Tales From Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made?
Author: David Hughes
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History; Business; Humour; Biography; Writing
Description: A compulsively readable journey into the area of movie-making where all writers, directors and stars fear to tread: Development Hell, the place where scripts are written, actors hired and sets designed... but the movies rarely actually get made! Whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky's Batman movie starring Clint Eastwood? Why were there so many scripts written over the years for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's fourth Indiana Jones movie? Why was Lara Croft's journey to the big screen so tortuous, and what prevented Paul Verhoeven from filming what he calls "one of the greatest scripts ever

TALES FROM DEVELOPMENT HELL

ISBN: 9780857687234

E-BOOK ISBN 9780857687319

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark St.

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First updated and expanded edition: February 2012

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Tales From Development Hell copyright © 2003, 2011

David Hughes. All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

To Sandra, ‘Kocham Cie’.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The views and opinions expressed by the interviewees and other third party sources in this book are not necessarily those of the author or publisher, and the author and publisher accept no responsibility for inaccuracies or omissions, and the author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability, loss, or risk, whether personal, financial, or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, from the contents of this book.

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TALES
FROM
DEVELOPMENT
HELL

THE GREATEST MOVIES NEVER MADE?

DAVID HUGHES

TITAN BOOKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere thanks are due to several key players who rescued this book from Development Hell:

Adam Newell, the producer who shepherded it into production and pulled double duty – quadruple duty if you include this second edition – as editor and continuity person;

Rod Edgar, the script researcher and production assistant whose diligence makes up for my negligence;

Chelsey Fox, the agent who negotiated the deal and made sure the writer didn’t get screwed;

Steven de Souza, who provided several terrific characters, and whose vast contribution seems almost sufficient to warrant shared story credit under Writers Guild regulations;

James V. Hart, whose tireless efforts gave me a whole subplot I would not otherwise have conceived of;

Gary Goldman, another great screenwriter much too gracious to take credit where it’s due;

Tab Murphy, who provided excellent guidance on the rewrite;

Beth Palma Diaz for invaluable research assistance;

Also deserving of a place on the credit list are the following key collaborators:

Grant Hawkins, Ted Henning, Lee and Janet Scott Batchler, Adam Rifkin, Don Murphy, Forrest J. Ackerman, Ralph Bakshi, David Cronenberg, Ron Shusett, Paul Verhoeven, Gary Goldman, Matthew Cirulnick, Steven de Souza, Jim Uhls, H. R. Giger, Jere Cunningham, David Koepp, Terry Moore, Neil Gaiman, William Farmer, David J. Schow, Richard Friedenberg, James V. Hart, Tom Topor, Darren Aronofsky, Wesley Strick Dean Devlin, Kevin J. Anderson and Glen Morgan.

Finally, special thanks to Sandra, Harry and Jenna for giving me peace, love and understanding while I worked on the Second Edition.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 DISILLUSIONED

How Smoke and Mirrors started life as a “weekend read”, became the hottest script in Hollywood — and then magically disappeared

2 MONKEY BUSINESS

An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters could hardly concoct a more bizarre story than the evolution of Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of Planet of the Apes

3 CAST INTO MOUNT DOOM

Paths not taken on the road to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings

4 WE CAN REWRITE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE

Why the long development of Total Recall and its unproduced sequel is a memory most of those involved would rather forget

5 KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES

Separating fact from fiction in the development of Indy IV

6 THE LOST CRUSADE

Despite an epic crusade by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it would take a miracle to bring Crusade to the screen

7 TRAIN WRECK

Despite the best efforts of Ridley Scott, Joel Silver, Sylvester Stallone and Roland Emmerich, the ‘Alien on a train’ movie Isobar never left the station

8 WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?

Before Scorsese’s The Aviator took off, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, Milos Forman and the aptly-named Hughes brothers all had their own pet Howard Hughes projects

9 PERCHANCE TO DREAM

The title character of Neil Gaiman’s critically acclaimed comic book The Sandman visited Hell. Unlike the film version, however, he made it back

10 CRISIS ON THE HOT ZONE

How Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Richard Preston bestseller failed to survive an Outbreak

11 FALL AND RISE OF THE DARK KNIGHT

The long and winding road to Batman Begins

12 TOMB RAIDER CHRONICLES

Why making the leap to the big screen was the toughest challenge Lara Croft had ever faced

13 THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FILM

How James Cameron, Roland Emmerich and others encountered huge problems trying to remake ’60s sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage

14 TALES FROM THE SCRIPT

From The Exorcist: The Beginning to Airborne: my own journeys into the Stygian darkness of Development Hell

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PROJECTS

WELCOME TO DEVELOPMENT HELL

“Trying to make a movie in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

— Douglas Adams

This is not the book I set out to write. Originally, I planned a kind of mainstream version of my earlier book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, covering some of the best unproduced scripts in recent Hollywood history. However, like so many movie-related projects before it, a degree of ‘Development Hell’ crept in, which turned this book into something else entirely. I already knew that the stories behind many unmade movies were more interesting than the movies themselves would ever have been. What I also discovered was that some of the films which suffered most in development did eventually get made — albeit with varying results — and the stories behind those projects are, to me, just as fascinating. Thus, as far as this is book is concerned, the development process was a positive experience — which is more than can be said for the various case studies it documents.

Why do so many Hollywood films go into development, only to wind up in Hell? What is this place to which so many promising-sounding projects and perfectly serviceable scripts seem to be banished, many of them never to be heard from again?

To understand the concept of Development Hell, one must first understand what development is. Producer Jane Hamsher, whose credits include Natural Born Killers and From Hell, has described development as follows: “The writer turns in a script. The producers and studio executives read it, give the writer their ‘development’ notes, and he goes back and rewrites as best he can, trying to make everyone happy. If it comes back and it’s great, the studio and the producers will try and attach a director and stars (if they haven’t already), and hopefully the picture will get made.”

That’s development, in theory. In practice, it’s more like this:

1. The writer turns in a script so unutterably perfect they would stick pens in their eyes sooner than change a single syllable of it.

2. The producer or studio executive, too busy/bored/illiterate to read the script for themselves, sends out for ‘script coverage’ — advice on the potential of the script from a professional script reader. If this doesn’t instantly lead to the script being junked and the writer being fired and replaced — either by a younger, hotter, cheaper model (a ‘tyro’), or an older, more experienced and more expensive one (a ‘veteran’) — the writer will be given ‘notes’. “Everybody gives writers notes,” says screenwriter Richard Friedenberg (Dying Young, A River Runs Through It), “[even] the garbage man. And the notes always conflict.”

3. If sufficiently encouraged to do so, the producer/executive might then actually read the script. “This is perfect,” he (or, one time in a thousand, she) might say. “Who can we get to rewrite it?” Then, in order to justify their own on-screen credit/exorbitant salary/job title/parking space, they will throw their own ideas into the mix or, more commonly, take ideas out. “In Hollywood, ideas are anathema,” says screenwriter-producer Gary Goldman (Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Minority Report), “and the bigger the budget, the more forbidden they are.”

4. The writer then scurries away to rewrite their magnum opus, doing their best to incorporate all the different, conflicting notes, and resubmits the script for approval.
Steps 1 through 4 are now repeated continuously, with the script continually evolving — and, in rare cases, improving — until finally someone decides it’s good enough (though probably not quite as good as the first draft) to make into a film...

5. This latest draft of the script is sent out to actors and directors, in the hope that it will attract one with sufficient clout to actually get it made. Interested directors — who may be attached to up to a dozen projects at a time, in the hopes that a studio will eventually give one of them a ‘green light’ — will almost certainly want a rewrite, to incorporate twenty-minute tracking shots, elaborate set-pieces, thousands of extras, impossible locations, etc., any of which can add a couple of zeroes to the budget the producer has in mind. Interested actors will almost certainly want a rewrite, to make their scenes larger, their character more heroic, their journey more arduous, their dialogue more, well, you know, gooder — even (or especially) if it means stealing the best lines from other characters. In other words, as one veteran screenwriter puts it, “tweaking a draft to better suit a star who’s expressed interest, only to have said star drop out of the project.” Since the desires of the studio, producers, director and actors are usually mutually exclusive, all of them will blame the writer, who will be fired and replaced by a new writer... taking the whole process back to stage 1.

That’s Development Hell.

The case studies outlined in this “updated and expanded” Second Edition could hardly be more varied. There’s detailed coverage of such famously unproduced films as Crusade, ISOBAR, Smoke & Mirrors and The Hot Zone. An exploration of early, ill-fated attempts to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen. An examination of how promising scripts for Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake and the Tomb Raider movie devolved through development into the crushing disappointments they became. The bizarre true story of Total Recall’s fifteen-year development, an epic gestation almost matched by its putative sequel... Rejected scripts and storylines for the fourth Indiana Jones film and the fifth Batman film. The various Howard Hughes projects which crashed and burned as soon as The Aviator took off. A brand new chapter detailing superstar directors James Cameron and Roland Emmerich’s involvement in the proposed Fantastic Voyage remake. And more.

Not wanting to repeat any of the films covered in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, I have left out the tortuous development of, for instance, Superman, Silver Surfer and The Fantastic Four — but that book is still available – and, indeed, recently revised and updated – and besides, the sorry tale of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman more than makes up for it.

In covering these stories, I have tried not to editorialise, to pass judgment on the content of the scripts themselves. If I naturally favour the writer in most instances, that is only to be expected, since I am one myself. Indeed, I believe that my commitment to the project is illustrated by the fact that several of my own screenplays are currently rotting in Development Hell – as detailed in the final chapter, also new to this Second Edition.

At least this book made it out alive.

David Hughes

September 2011

DISILLUSIONED

How Smoke and Mirrors started life as a “weekend read”, became the hottest script in Hollywood — and then magically disappeared

“They wanted Indiana Jones meets Lawrence of Arabia. Most of the scripts were the latter with none of the former — though one was so confusing I couldn’t figure out which line it fell on.”

— Ted Henning, screenwriter

On a Friday in February 1993, Hollywood was buzzing with more than just the usual combination of traffic, cell phones and celebrity gossip. At two separate studios in Burbank and several high-profile agencies, the word-of-mouth concerning a 128-page script by two unknown writers was increasing from ‘buzz’ to cacophony, as executives at Warner Bros and The Walt Disney Company engaged in a bidding war to secure the rights to what had become, almost overnight, the most sought-after script in Hollywood.

The script at the centre of all this excitement and activity was Lee and Janet Scott Batchler’s Smoke and Mirrors, a historical epic written ‘on spec’, and inspired by actual events from the life of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), the father of modern stage magic — and, incidentally, the magician who inspired Ehric Weiss to become ‘Houdini’. “This was the gentleman who, in the mid-1800s, virtually invented the art of stage magic,” Lee Batchler explains. “Vanishing, levitation, illusion, and all the things that David Copperfield and the other Vegas magicians do. He had an engineer’s mind, and he figured out how to do all that, without all the rather tacky Chinese robes that were the fashion of the day. He would do his act in a tight tuxedo so there was clearly no place to hide anything, and he would produce these incredible things from nowhere. He became a very rich man.”

Lee recalls reading Robert-Houdin’s autobiography, the last chapter of which is devoted to a visit the magician made to Algeria in the 1850s, to debunk a local tribal leader or marabout, Zoras Al-Khatim, who was said to be using divine magic to incite an uprising against the French occupiers. “So the French government had the bright idea of bringing the world’s greatest magician, Robert-Houdin, to go to Algeria and show these people that these were illusions. So he went down there and exposed the sorcerers for being the frauds they were. We said, ‘There’s a movie here.’” Adds Janet, “As we researched and thought through various ideas, we returned to that story and pitched it, among many others, to our writers group. The kernel of the story that would become Smoke and Mirrors was the one everyone responded to with extreme enthusiasm, and we knew we had found a story worth working on.”

As the story begins, Jean-Pierre Robert-Houdin (they had decided ‘Jean-Eugène’ would be too difficult for English-speaking audiences) has turned his back on his prestidigitatorial past — “Manipulating the laws of physics on one hand, twisting people’s minds on the other: it’s not a fit way to make a living,” Robert-Houdin declares in the script’s first draft — in order to devote himself to scientific study. This decision leaves Colette, his beautiful wife (and, in the magician tradition, former assistant), only too eager to escape the gilded cage of their estate in the Parisian suburbs by venturing into terra incognita on behalf of the French government, in order to help quell a rebellion being fomented there by Berber sorcerers. “These non-Arab anti-colonial rebels were committing deadly atrocities against all French in North Africa, including innocent women and children, and were trying to woo the peace-loving Arab population to their cause,” the Batchlers note, taking pains to head off accusations of anti-Arab sentiment at the pass. “As their credential of divine backing for their acts of terrorism, they performed very persuasive ‘miracles’ of black magic. A bloody civil war was about to happen if something wasn’t done.”

Just as all movie heroes initially resist the call to arms, Houdin is at first reluctant to accept the assignment. “Whatever days I have left,” he explains, “I’m not going to waste doing card tricks for Barbarian primitives in the God-forsaken desert, just to prove that my brand of lying is superior to their brand of lying!” Yet, as is also customary, he ultimately capitulates.[1] Upon arriving in Algiers, Robert-Houdin’s forthrightness and contempt for authority land him in life-threatening danger, from which he is rescued by Darcy, a fearless French Foreign Legionnaire with a wooden hand, who quickly becomes enamoured of Colette. Although Colette seems equally entranced by Darcy, her flirtatiousness is perhaps designed more to regain her husband’s attention than to encourage Darcy’s, and the frisson this creates does not stop Darcy and Houdin becoming firm friends — not least when Houdin finds a way to repay Darcy for saving his life.

The second act sees Robert-Houdin, Colette and Darcy set off for the desert palace of Bou-Allem, the most influential Arab sheik in the country. “Bou-Allem, a devout seeker of truth, is still flirting with the rebels, waiting to be convinced as to whose side to take — Berber or French,” the Batchlers explain. “So he summons Robert-Houdin to a one-on-one command performance — basically a showdown against the rebellion’s chief sorcerer.” Though the odds are stacked against him, Robert-Houdin beats the sorcerer Zoras at his own game, totally disgracing him even in the eyes of his own men — and reminding the magician of his former glory. “We then weave elements from other historical research to create the climax for our story,” the Batchlers add, “which involves the trek from the desert wilderness back to Algiers via the treacherous Kabyle Mountains, where Robert-Houdin and his party are ambushed by a loyal remnant of the disgraced sorcerer’s army.

Our heroes take refuge and fight it out inside an ancient abandoned tenth century citadel, which we patterned after real fortresses that once existed in those mountains. Outgunned and outmanned, Robert-Houdin must marshal all his magician’s cunning in order to defeat his foes inside that fortress.” Thus, the stage is set for an exciting third act in which Zoras seeks vengeance for his humiliation at Robert-Houdin’s hands.

On 5 January 1993, after nine drafts, the Batchlers were finally ready to type ‘FIRST DRAFT’ on the title page of the script. “We weren’t sure what to do,” Janet later recalled. “We had no access to anyone who would be able to make a picture this big.” After sitting on the script for more than a month, Janet called an acquaintance at Longbow Productions, a small production company which had one big film to its name: the women’s’ baseball picture A League of Their Own. Although Longbow partner Bill Pace felt the script needed work, he liked it enough to take an option on it, paying a token fee (typically one dollar) to the Batchlers, before sending the script to Howard Koch, Jr., who had a production deal at Paramount Pictures. Koch liked it enough to send it to the William Morris Agency’s Alan Gasmer. “Alan did a great job of talking it up without letting anyone see it,” says Janet, “and more and more people began to ask for it.”

Around town, as well as at the Sundance Film Festival, Gasmer let it be known that this project was about to come up for auction. He had sent the script out to various studios and producers, as is customary, hoping for a call-back from at least one of the few with the power and resources to option or purchase outright a script whose historical setting, special effects, star-driven subject matter and epic scale demanded a budget estimated at $55 million: Universal Pictures, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, Columbia-controlled TriStar, Warner Bros and The Walt Disney Company. “It was a movie-movie, like Romancing the Stone, Star Wars or Indiana Jones, with a Lawrence of Arabia scope to it because it had the desert and castles and such, and it came down to what studios had the nerve and the big bucks to pony up and say, ‘We want to play this game.’”

Among those to whom Gasmer had pitched the project was Jay Stern, a development executive at Disney-owned Hollywood Pictures, over lunch at The Grill in Beverly Hills. Stern’s response was immediate, and enthusiastic. “Sounds great,” he told Gasmer. “Please, I want this. That’s one I would really, really like to get my hands on.” Stern got his hands on the script the following Tuesday, and took it home with him, planning to read the first forty pages (typically, the first act of a 128-page script) before bed. Instead, he finished it. Stern called Gasmer first thing the following morning, and left messages with Interscope and Cinergi, two production companies with which Disney might share the costs of the mega-budget project.

Arriving at his company’s regular Wednesday morning story meeting, Stern pitched the story to his superiors, including Hollywood Pictures president Ricardo Mestres and Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, telling them that it was big, original, well executed, distinctive — and definitely going to be snapped up fast by a rival studio if they did not make a move on it. Mestres read the script that morning and agreed that Disney should bid, and immediately sent the script to Andrew G. Vajna, the Hungarian-born founder of Cinergi and producer of such big-budget films as Judge Dredd and Super Mario Bros. Unfortunately, at nearby Warner Bros, executive Tom Lassally had made the same assessment, and called Gasmer to ask what kind of deal his clients were looking for. “I’m looking for a million,” Gasmer told both interested parties, with typical agent chutzpah. By Friday, after newly-installed Paramount production head Tom Levine had passed on the project, Gasmer had Disney, Warner Bros and TriStar readying their cheque books.

TriStar had already sent the script to Wolfgang Petersen, the German-born director who would later direct In the Line of Fire and The Perfect Storm. “I don’t know if they got an answer from Wolfgang,” Stern told Thom Taylor, author of The Big Deal: Hollywood’s Million-Dollar Spec Script Market, “but it was Friday afternoon and I knew that [Warner Bros executive] Bruce Berman was unreachable.” Indeed, Berman was snowed in at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, stuck on the tarmac on on United Airlines Flight 7 to Los Angeles, and therefore unable either to leave the plane, or even use his cellphone.

This being Hollywood, Stern used Berman’s predicament to his advantage: “I was concerned that as soon as Lassally reached Berman and had the conversation, that they would just put a million dollars on the table.” With Disney’s Mestres and Cinergi’s Vajna agreeing to split the development costs, with Katzenberg insisting that Disney’s exposure be limited to $14 million, Stern made Gasmer an offer he knew his clients could not refuse: one million dollars, with an additional commitment to commission the Batchlers to write another script, to be decided upon at a later date. Gasmer, however, was unable to reach his clients, who were en route to a weekend-long writers’ group seminar in Cambria, some 220 miles north of Los Angeles.

“Friday, the day the auction was coming to a close, was the day we were scheduled to drive up the coast to meet everyone for the weekend,” the Batchlers recall. “Because this was back in 1993, we didn’t have a cell phone, and had to stop every fifteen minutes or so, pull off the road, and find a pay phone to check in with Alan to see how things were going. We know his inability to get hold of us was somewhat frustrating to the people bidding — at one point an exec told him, ‘Get your clients to a phone and get them to stay there!’ — so eventually, we stopped at a small courtyard motel outside Arroyo Grande and stayed on the phone for about an hour, responding to the final bidding, until the deal was done.”

Giddy with excitement, the Batchlers celebrated in style, treating the other members of their writers’ group to dinner. “Unfortunately, that particular weekend we may have had the sale but didn’t have the cash in hand, so we had to borrow money from one of the other writers to actually hold the celebration dinner. We were rich on paper, but cash-poor.” The facts remained, however: the Batchlers had a seven-figure commitment from a major studio. Their names were now known by some of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And their script was on the fast-track at Disney.

While the feeding frenzy surrounding Smoke and Mirrors was not uncommon, what happened next was unusual to say the least: within three weeks, the script had achieved ‘go movie’ status. Immediately after the option deal was signed, Ricardo Mestres had secured the services of producer, director (and amateur magician) Frank Marshall, who had helmed the Disney hits Arachnophobia and Alive, and produced several Steven Spielberg films. Although Marshall had recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures, he retained the freedom to direct a picture elsewhere, and Smoke and Mirrors was immediately elevated to the top of his own personal script pile.

Meanwhile, Vajna managed to interest Sean Connery (who had just starred in Cinergi’s Medicine Man) in the lead role of Robert-Houdin, a development certain to attract other A-list stars to the film’s other principal roles: Colette, Robert-Houdin’s glamorous wife, and Darcy, the dashing American who accompanies the pair on their trip into the desert. But as the Batchlers were preparing to bathe in the glow of the film’s green light, the title Smoke and Mirrors proved to be prophetic. “We thought it was a wonderful script which just needed some work on the ending,” Vajna told Neil Rosser, producer of a BBC radio documentary adapted from the first edition of this book. “We enlisted Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall to produce and Marshall to direct; we had Sean Connery signed up as the star of the movie and we were looking at locations, but we were still working on the script, and somehow we could never get the end of the story right.”

Firstly, Sean Connery allegedly slowed the pre-production process by requesting rewrites, as is customary with A-list actors, to tailor the script to his own style. Lee and Janet Scott Batchler churned out several subsequent drafts, the last being a 132-page fourth draft dated January 1994. “We were very involved with the development of the project during its Sean Connery phase,” say the Batchlers. “Sean was attached within days of the script being sold, as were Frank Marshall and [producer] Kathy Kennedy. We met with Sean to get his notes, and spent months working with Frank and Kathy. [They] were great to work with in every respect and we think the world of them. We did three rewrites while working with Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy on the project. We were really focused at that point on getting the script ready for production,” they add. “We were very happy with the fourth draft of the script, which was the culmination of our rewrites. The original script is powerful for reasons of its clean, uncomplicated approach to the storytelling — it’s just a great ride, start to finish. [But] we personally feel the fourth draft deepened the main characters and added several plot elements that actually improved on the original while retaining what was important.”

Sean Connery did not share their enthusiasm, however; although he remained attached to the project, he insisted upon further rewrites, by which time the Batchlers had been hired by Warner Bros’ Bruce Berman to write Batman Forever, the third installment of the studio’s most profitable franchise. In their place, the Smoke and Mirrors producers hired Alive and Congo screenwriter John Patrick Shanley to rework the story; the inevitable result being that Connery’s rewritten role diminished the supporting roles, Darcy and Colette, making them more difficult to cast. By the time Shanley turned in his draft, Frank Marshall had departed to direct Congo for Paramount, leaving Smoke and Mirrors without a director. Connery and Shanley parted company with the project soon afterwards, at which point John Fasano (Another 48 Hrs.) and Douglas Ray Stewart (An Officer and a Gentleman) took turns at the script. Since screen credit and remuneration tends to be apportioned depending on each screenwriter’s contribution, however, both Fasano and Stewart may have been inclined to change elements which might otherwise have fallen under the caveat of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Thus, the script began to move further and further away from the one which had excited Disney in the first place, and closer to ‘Development Hell’.

Then, in late 1994, Cinergi development executive Brett Fain brought in a young writer named Ted Henning, whose script for an unproduced pirate adventure, Caribbean Blue, suggested that he might be suitable to mount a salvage operation. “He was a very smart guy and very [committed] to creating a version of the script that the company could actually make,” Henning observes of Fain. “Each had some interesting aspects, but none was shootable — none would make a great movie,” Henning says of the previous drafts, all of which Fain showed to him. “They all lacked a sense of fun that we felt was imperative for the movie to connect. [The producers] wanted Indiana Jones meets Lawrence of Arabia. Most of the scripts were the latter with none of the former — though one was so confusing I couldn’t figure out which line it fell on.” Henning dismissed Stewart’s draft as “unreadable”, but liked Fasano’s take on the material. “It was really detailed,” he says. “He’d done all this research; you could tell. He brought in the hashashim, a really violent cult in Algeria in Northern Africa, which gave us the word ‘assassin’.”[2] “He brought some incredible detail to it,” adds Henning, “but I think he got bogged down in the detail. I went back to the Batchler draft and started from there, working very closely with Brett to create a tight, fun epic that would stay as true to the story as possible while connecting with the largest audience possible, to warrant the $100 million-plus the movie would cost to make.”

The nature of their producer-writer collaboration was unusual: instead of taking Fain’s notes and delivering a script a few months later, Henning would write ten or fifteen pages at a time, and then go over them with Fain to see if the script was going in the right direction. “It was a really close [working relationship] which a lot of screenwriters wouldn’t like,” he says. “But Brett was a really smart guy. He had been through all the permutations, and had a really good sense of it.” Both knew that the script’s biggest flaw was structure. “The movie is about Houdin going to Algeria, and then what happens over there, so you have to set him up in France, put him in some situation where he’s vulnerable, and then get him on the boat. [The Batchlers] didn’t get him on the boat until page fifty.”[3] Although Henning and Fain liked the Batchlers’ script, both felt that it lacked focus, that Robert-Houdin’s character arc was weak, and that it failed to realise the potential of the Robert-Houdin/Darcy/ Colette love triangle.

“Structurally, we got it down,” Henning says. “We also made really strong decisions about Houdin’s arc,” he adds, noting that, in all subsequent drafts, Robert-Houdin’s name was further simplified to ‘Houdin’ — presumably for the convenience of the same audience who could not be trusted to pronounce ‘Jean-Eugène’. “We started him off as this powerful magician who was on top of the world, and we just flushed him down the toilet. He was disillusioned; he had killed someone with a magic trick [when] something had gone terribly wrong. In real life, it actually happened — I think his son or daughter was killed — and he basically then switched over to science and became a big debunker, and tried to find the reality of his world, because up to then he’d been living the illusion of celebrity. So when we found him [in the story], he hadn’t been out of the lab in six months, and his girlfriend [rather than wife] Colette was at the end of her rope, so when he is asked to go to French-occupied Algeria, she says, ‘If you don’t go, I’m leaving you.’ He figures he’s going to debunk this guy as a fake, and then leave. Of course, as soon as he gets there, things start happening to draw him deeper and deeper into it, until finally he reaches that place which you reach in all movies, where our hero gets to decide whether he’s gonna give up and go home, or carry on and kick some ass.

“The other main character in it is Darcy, an American in the French Foreign Legion, who has given up his life because his wife was killed, and is fearless basically because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies,” Henning continues. “So Houdin is in his fifties, and he’s got this beautiful French girlfriend, but all of a sudden there’s this strapping Mel Gibson-type [love rival] who is brave and silly. So when Houdin is finally faced with ‘shit or get off the pot’, the real reason he decides to shit is that Darcy’s going like, ‘Hey, you leave, I’m in bed with her five minutes later.’” After several drafts, Henning and Fain had a script which they felt was working. Commenting on the 116-page draft dated 30 April 1997, online script reviewer ‘Stax’ described the story as follows: “Houdin travels to Algeria (accompanied by Colette) for the purpose of demonstrating first-hand to the natives how Zoras’ sorcery is performed. Guiding and protecting Houdin and Colette on their dangerous journey is a detachment of French Foreign Legionnaires, led by the swashbuckling Captain Trey Darcy and his Spanish second-in-command, Corporal Augustino Bartolote.

“The group’s journey through Algeria is fraught with peril, as Zoras makes several sudden appearances (using actual magic?) to try and scare them off. During the course of this adventure, the one-handed Darcy (yes, that’s right, he fences with a wooden prosthetic!) and Colette discover a growing romantic attraction to one another despite their respective obligations to Houdin. This rivalry for Colette’s affection, and his confrontations with Zoras, reinvigorates Houdin’s long-dormant vitality and his faith in himself and in the magic arts. Exposing Zoras’ trickery to his fellow tribesmen, Houdin succeeds in becoming a marked man. Houdin and the expedition must then flee the wrathful Zoras and his army of rebels. This draft culminates with an Alamo-like siege at a legendary desert fortress between Zoras’ forces and the cornered Legionnaires.”[4] Overall, Stax saw Smoke & Mirrors (in Henning’s drafts, an ampersand replaced the ‘and’) as “a fact-based adventure chock full of romance, wizardry, David Lean-style vistas, and Golden Age of Hollywood production values.”

Despite the Batchlers’ assertion that Zoras’ men are Berbers, not Arabs, Stax had concerns about the fact that the heroes are essentially Colonialist occupiers, fighting Algerian natives — who, in reality, took 180 years to rid themselves of the oppressive French and win back their homeland. Henning’s answer to this moral quandary was to make Zoras so bloodthirsty and mad as to distance him from the other Arabic figures in the story, and ennoble the Colonial heroes. As a by-product of this, Stax observed, “Zoras is pretty one-note heavy in this story. He’s mainly a vessel for special effects, just as most of the other Arab characters are mere window dressing.” Stax felt that the romantic rivalry between Houdin, Colette and Darcy was handled well, however. “Darcy is a man of honour who finds himself drawn to the lover of the man he’s charged to protect, and who he finds lacking in how to treat a woman right. Darcy then becomes torn between his feelings and his obligation to duty. Subsequently, Houdin realizes what he stands to lose if Colette forsakes him for Darcy. This realisation helps Houdin snap out of being such a Grumpy Old Magician. (There are a few good jabs where people mistake Houdin for Colette’s father.) If Darcy is a man of action then Houdin is a man of thought who instead relies on his wits and experience. Both men turn out to be more alike than they figured, and they eventually form an alliance to battle Zoras.”

Despite her status as the object of affection of both male leads, Stax noted, “Colette is thankfully no mere damsel in distress. Her attraction to Darcy and her reasons for staying with Houdin are well drawn. But the very nature of being a magician’s assistant means Colette is relegated to being a supporting player... Overall,” he concluded, “the dialogue here was sharp and playful but became far too tongue-in-cheek by Act Three. By then, characters were speaking in comic book-like dialogue balloons. It was one quip after another, and the puns deteriorated in quality as they grew in quantity.” Despite such reservations, Henning recalls that the reaction to the script was largely favourable. “Brett was happy,” he says. “Andy Vajna liked it but wasn’t excited about it, probably because he had not gotten any feedback from the stars... and then Cinergi fell apart. Andy went off on his own and Brett left, and that was pretty much all I heard from it.”

By this time, Smoke & Mirrors had accrued several million dollars’ worth of negative costs against it, meaning that if anyone took it over — another studio, for instance, or a producer — some of those costs would have to be repaid, either up front or, more commonly, from future profits. As Vajna explains, “We spent a lot of money because we had just about started to make the movie when everybody bailed out. I think it was close to nine or ten million dollars, part of which Disney wrote off, part of it I wrote it, part of it another studio wrote off. And of course if you wanted to make it today you couldn’t start with those kind of costs, so all you can do is hope that one day if the film becomes a huge success that you might be able to get part of that money back.”

Nevertheless, in 1999, a buyer emerged: Joel Douglas, son of screen legend Kirk and older brother of Oscar-winning actor-producer Michael Douglas, for whom he had co-produced Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. Joel had formed a partnership with actor/director-turned-producer Kevin Brodie (fiancé of Joel’s sister, Joann Savitt), funded by Initial Entertainment Group, one of the principals of which was David Jones, brother of Michael’s fiancée Catherine Zeta-Jones. The plan was to tailor Smoke & Mirrors as a vehicle for Michael and Catherine; in addition, it was widely reported that Kirk Douglas, recovering from a stroke he suffered in 1995, might take a small role as a sultan named Bou-Allem, whose son, Rachid, accompanies Houdin during the latter part of the story.

Despite the fact that the Douglas-Brodie partnership had secured a two-year option from Andy Vajna, they had apparently been shown only the original Batchler draft, and were unaware of any other. Thus, they hired another A-list writer, who spent six months and a great deal of money rewriting the Batchlers’ script — with disastrous consequences.

“Michael and Catherine obviously wanted to do Smoke & Mirrors — it was a great movie for them to do together — but they were at their wits’ end, because they had spent all this money, and the script was, by all accounts, unreadable,” says Henning. “I never saw it — I don’t even know who the writer was — but they were, like, ‘This is horrible.’” As a last resort, the producers called Brett Fain, who asked if they had read Henning’s draft — the one he felt was filmable. “They read it and called me and said, ‘This is exactly what we’re looking for.’” Henning agreed to meet with them to discuss yet another rewrite. “There are very few people in Hollywood I respect,” he says, “but with Michael, from Fatal Attraction to Wall Street and Falling Down, his movies have had social impact; social resonance. So when I went over to their house in Century City, it was pretty trippy — you know, having ‘Gordon Gekko’ open the door in his slippers, and Catherine heavily pregnant.” The trio spent several hours discussing story and character, following which Henning embarked on another rewrite.

This draft, 110 pages in length and dated August 2000, was described by online script reviewer Stax as “leaner, less campy and [with] better dialogue than either his 1997 rewrite or the Batchlers’ script ... retaining the basic structure and scenes from the Batchlers’ version while improving the content of those scenes, how they’re played out, and the overall behaviour of the characters.” While Stax also felt that this draft had “less panache” than the 1997 version, “the 2000 draft is less giddy and the last act’s no longer a tirade of pithy one-liners and sight gags.” Stax also liked the development of the Houdin/Colette/Darcy love triangle. “Smoke & Mirrors is now driven forward by a trio of heroes rather than just by Houdin; Darcy and Colette are no longer mere sidekicks,” he observed. Darcy, in particular, had been developed beyond what he saw as the “swashbuckler cliché” of earlier drafts, although he was still demonstrably more of a man of action than Houdin’s more cerebral protagonist. Houdin, meanwhile, had become “less verbose and theatrical, more withdrawn and cold now, rather than snooty.” Stax also felt that a good balance had been struck between making Colette a woman of her time and retaining an independent streak that’s familiar to modern audiences. “She’s just plucky and passionate enough without seeming out of step with 1856 Algeria.” Stax further noted that the “cartoonish” portrayal of the Arabs had been toned down, and even the principal villain, Zoras, had been improved. “While he’s still a secondary (and even sketchy) character, Zoras [is] less of a hokey super-villain now. His dialogue was less theatrical and his presence more enigmatic.”

“Supposedly everyone liked it,” Henning says of this draft, “and before long the film was in pre-production, with location scouts and set designers working around the clock. That’s when things got sort of bogged down.” Indeed, it was several months before Smoke & Mirrors secured an A-list director, during which time Douglas and Zeta-Jones co-starred in their first film together — Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (though they shared no scenes) — were married, and celebrated the birth of their first child. Then, in February 2001, it was announced that the director of Smoke & Mirrors would be John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair), whose planned sequel to Basic Instinct had just fallen apart. On 22 May 2001, industry bible Variety reported that the film might start shooting as early as the autumn: “The fact-based story ... has been a high-profile affair since 1993, but reported interest from the likes of Mel Gibson and Sean Connery turned out to be its own version of smoke and mirrors. Douglas’ brother Joel and Zeta-Jones’ brother David are producing with Kevin Brodie, and if the film’s producer, Initial Entertainment Group, can pull together the financing for the ambitious film and lock down the A-list principals, the movie will be no illusion.”

According to Henning, McTiernan’s involvement sparked a new wave of difficulties for the production. “He instantly set the world on fire,” the screenwriter explains. “He started making all these demands, like he wanted to have Leslie Dixon, his pet writer, work on it. She’d written Pay It Forward, which didn’t make her seem like the best person to rewrite Smoke & Mirrors. Besides, they’d already gone through an eight- or ten-year multi-million dollar rewrite cycle and they were happy with the script. They didn’t want to start yet another development cycle on it where the new writer would want to change everything.”

Nevertheless, eager for the project to move forward, Douglas and Zeta-Jones invited Dixon to stay with them at their holiday home in northern Majorca, to which the writer allegedly responded by saying she would not be able to meet them for two weeks — a move which Douglas and Zeta-Jones took as a snub. Shortly afterwards, in June 2001, McTiernan left the project, citing what Variety described as “insurmountable business differences.” As the Batchlers put it: “John McTiernan never was that involved with the project. The trades often announce things before they are nailed down. Almost immediately after McTiernan’s involvement was announced, his deal fell apart for business reasons and was never finalized, so he quickly departed from the project before doing any work on it.”

By this time, the Batchlers had been brought back into the mix, after a delay of almost a decade. “It was sort of like we were on a train track,” says Janet, “and we had kept moving forward on our own train, and Smoke and Mirrors had gone off on a little siding. We would get reports and say, ‘Oh no, I hope they don’t ruin it!’ But it seemed to be in this endless grind of being rewritten and nothing happening. It didn’t bother us too much because while it was always our first love, being our first big sale, we were busy with other projects and creatively our minds were wrapped up in other worlds and other stories.” The Batchlers had several meetings with Joel Douglas, who agreed that their original scripts would form the basis of the film — or at least the latest set of rewrites. “They were also scouring our other two drafts for nuggets that might be of use. Our interactions with Joel were all very amiable and supporting of our original vision. However, Michael had already decided that a playwright friend of his from England — his ‘pocket writer’, as it were — should do a dialogue polish for him and Catherine.” Nevertheless, a purchase price was agreed: $7.5 million dollars. “Of course, we didn’t see any of that,” Janet explains, “that money all going to the companies that owned the script at the time. But it jump-started the project again, and the next thing we knew we were being invited to sit down and talk with the producers.”

Adding to the problems plaguing the production was a rival project, The Magician’s Wife, adapted by E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial scribe Melissa Mathison from a novel by the late Brian Moore, based on the same historical events as Smoke & Mirrors. According to a report in Screen International, the $25 million film was set to star Academy Award winners Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet, under the direction of François Girard (The Red Violin). The similarities were no mere illusion: set, like Smoke & Mirrors, in 1856, Moore’s novel concerns Henri, formerly France’s greatest magician, now content to spend his days tinkering with mechanical devices (much to the annoyance of his long-suffering wife Emmeline) until a French colonel convinces Henri to put on a magic show in French-occupied Algeria, in order to convince the natives that a marabout (living saint) with alleged magical powers is no more powerful a magician than Henri himself, and thus avert a holy war.

Girard’s film, however, did not materialize, and barely a few weeks passed before The Peacemaker and Deep Impact director Mimi Leder — whose most recent film, Pay It Forward, had been scripted by Leslie Dixon — was announced as director of Smoke & Mirrors. At this point, the budget was pegged at under $100 million, but when Leder returned from a location scouting expedition to Morocco (at the production’s expense, of course), she submitted a budget proposal a full fifty million dollars higher. After all, Leder reasoned, the script featured three star-driven roles, took place in Paris and Algiers in 1856, included an Indiana Jones-style set piece in the desert palace of Sulieman the Great, and several other expensive scenes, including an ocean voyage. There was even a musical set-piece. “We wrote in a song for Colette, who’s supposed to be a cabaret singer,” Henning explains. “There’s a scene where Houdin is with Colette and all the sheiks, and they start bidding black camels for her. And she’s like, ‘Three black camels, are you kidding?’ So she gets up and does this dance number where she kind of shows the sheiks — and also Houdin — what she’s worth.”

“Mimi Leder would have been absolutely fantastic,” says Janet Batchler. “We would have been very excited to have her direct the project. They were in pre-production, location scouting in Morocco, and set to start shooting in January 2002. And then 9/11 happened.” We were told very authoritatively that Michael Douglas and some other people connected to the production were not going to go to some Islamic country in the wake of 9/11 to shoot a movie. And I suppose the money people got a little nervous about it. They were just a few months away from production and the planned shoot in Morocco fell apart.” In a bid to rescue the project, some Arizona locations were scouted, “but the project couldn’t be put back together in time for its planned early 2002 start date.”

Douglas and Zeta Jones remained attached to the project through a period in which rights holder Initial Entertainment Group was bought by InterMedia Film, which company virtually shut down when the German government closed the tax shelter upon which it was heavily reliant. Although it was reported in 2001 that Conan the Barbarian and Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius had been tapped to write yet another new Smoke and Mirrors screenplay, little further was heard from the project. In 2006 came not one but two period films with magic as their subject matter: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti). Although generally well received in critical circles, their mixed fortunes at the box office failed to spark a revival of interest in magic in general, nor Smoke &/and Mirrors in particular.

Almost two decades after their million-dollar script sale, the Batchlers would be back in the news for the sale of a big-budget action-adventure with a basis in historical fact: Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii. “It’s a small intimate story (ha!) in which a mountain explodes, eighteen thousand people die horribly, and a young slave fights insurmountable odds to win his freedom and the woman he loves, having chosen a very bad day for it,” the Batchlers say of their $95 million movie, due for release in 2013. Meanwhile, they refuse to give up on the prospect of seeing Smoke and Mirrors on the big screen. “For one thing, in half the meetings we take, someone still comments on what a great script it is, how much they loved it, and how they wish it would get made. For another thing, the fact that the movie hasn’t been made means that no one has ruined a frame of it yet. We still expect this movie to be made someday — and then we will get to ‘look back’ on the experience. At this point,” the Batchlers conclude, “we are still looking forward as well.”

“I think it will find its way,” says Andrew G. Vajna, “because if a project is strong enough and had the right story to tell, and a fascinating period in which it tells it, I think that sooner or later it will come to light.”

___________

1 In early drafts, his motivation for his change of heart is unclear: he is resolutely apolitical, and seems unmoved by the idea of oppressed Arabs rising up against their French conquerors; yet his sudden change of mind is typical of his mercurial, idiosyncratic personality.

2 In fact, the hashashim were mentioned in the Batchlers’ very first draft, as Darcy describes them to Colette: “An order of fanatics devoted to the art of political murder. That’s where our word ‘assassin’ comes from.”

3 While this may be true of their subsequent drafts, the Batchlers’ first draft has Robert-Houdin and Colette on the boat by page 11.

4 For the record, the Batchler drafts climaxed in precisely the same way.

MONKEY BUSINESS

An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters could hardly concoct a more bizarre story than the evolution of Tim Burton’s “re-imagining” of Planet of the Apes

“I thought it was gonna be fantastic, like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The movie they actually made was a bad Twilight Zone episode.”

— producer Don Murphy

In 1962, the publication of Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planète des Singes (‘The Planet of the Apes’) caused something of a sensation in his native France. Not just because the novel — in which three astronauts crash-land on a planet populated by intelligent apes — was an inspired and dramatically different science fiction fable with a seam of socio-political satire running throughout, but because, at the time, Boulle was considered one of France’s most gifted ‘serious’ writers. His previous novels such as Face of a Hero, A Noble Profession and The Bridge on the River Kwai — the film adaptation of which had won him an Oscar in 1958 — were all rooted firmly in the real world. Boulle’s single, extraordinary idea — that of an “upside-down” world where apes were a highly evolved species, and men little more than their pets — was triggered by a visit to the zoo, where the apes’ mimicry of human mannerisms set him thinking about the relationships between the two species. It was his sole contribution to the field of science fiction; indeed, Boulle protested that the book hardly belonged to the genre at all.

Shortly after the book’s publication, a French literary agent brought it to the attention of Hollywood producer Arthur P. Jacobs, aware that Jacobs was looking for “something like King Kong” that he could turn into a major motion picture. “He told me the story,” Jacobs later recalled, “and I said, ‘I’ll buy it — [I] gotta buy it.’ He said, ‘I think you’re crazy, but okay.’” As Jacobs would discover after some three and a half years of rejections, the agent’s belief that Planet of the Apes was unfilmable was an opinion shared by many, Boulle included. “I never thought it could be made into a film,” the author later admitted. “It seemed to me too difficult, and there was a chance that it would appear ridiculous.”

Even Jacobs’ friend Charlton Heston, who had committed to the lead role within an hour of hearing the producer’s pitch on 5 June 1965, doubted that the film would ever be made. “The novel was singularly uncinematic,” said the actor. “All Arthur had was the rights to the novel and a portfolio of paintings depicting possible scenes. There wasn’t even a treatment outlining an effective script,” he added, despite the fact that Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling had admitted spending “well over a year, and thirty or forty drafts” trying to translate Boulle’s novel to the screen. Nevertheless, the Oscar-winning star of such epics as Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments and El Cid stuck with the project through months of Development Hell, “trudging studio to studio with [Jacobs’] paintings and being laughed at: ‘No kidding, talking monkeys and rocket ships? Gedouttahere!’” He even brought an A-list director, Franklin J. Schaffner, on board when Blake Edwards, Jacobs’ original choice, moved on after spending more than a year attached to the project. Yet even the combined track record of Jacobs, Heston and Schaffner, who had directed Heston in The War Lord, could not get the movie made.

The problem, it seemed, was the one Boulle had foreseen: that there was every chance that a film featuring a principal cast of talking apes might appear ridiculous to a cinema audience. Finally, Jacobs convinced 20th Century Fox’s head of production, Richard D. Zanuck, to let him spend $5,000 on a makeup test, which was filmed on a jury-rigged set on 8 March 1966. “Rod Serling wrote a long, nine-page scene, a conversation between Taylor and Dr Zaius,” Jacobs recalled of the test, directed by Schaffner, and featuring Heston as the misanthropic astronaut Taylor and his Ten Commandments co-star Edward G. Robinson in full ape make-up as the orang-utan science minister Dr Zaius, with a young James Brolin and Linda Harrison — who would later be cast as the mute beauty Nova — as the sympathetic chimpanzees, Cornelius and Zira. “We packed the screening room with everyone we could get ahold of,” Jacobs added, “and Zanuck said, ‘If they start laughing, forget it.’ Nobody laughed. They sat there, tense, and he said, ‘Make the picture.’”

The make-up test had also impressed John Chambers, a former prosthetics designer turned Hollywood make-up artist whose innovative creations had been seen in Star Trek (Mr Spock’s ears), and John Huston’s film The List of Adrian Messenger (completely disguising the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum for their cameos). “The make-up was crude,” he remarked of Ben Nye’s work for the test, “but they had a semblance of what they wanted. That’s how the concept was started.” Chambers was required to solve a number of problems before filming could begin. Should the evolved apes look like Neanderthal Man, like animals, or somewhere in between? How could the three subspecies in the script — and the various gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan characters — be differentiated? How could masks be made to express the actors’ own facial movements, and handle the voice projection required for sound recording? How could the make-up be applied and removed quickly enough to make filming practical?

While Chambers struggled to solve the make-up problems, the filmmakers continued to reshape the script, initially with Serling, and later with Oscar-winner Michael Wilson, a once-blacklisted screenwriter — originally uncredited on The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia due to his suspected Communist allegiances — who knew all about senseless prejudice. Wilson’s experience at Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings lent authenticity and added poignancy to the tribunal scene, the simian equivalent of a typical ‘kangaroo court’. With each new draft, the story drifted farther from its source novel, largely because Boulle’s depiction of the simians as a technologically advanced race with cars, buildings and helicopters — all re-scaled for primates — required a far larger budget than Fox would allow. “The early designs were of a very high-tech civilisation, which meant you had to design all kinds of special vehicles and buildings and so on,” Heston explained. “And Frank [Schaffner] said, ‘I don’t have enough budget as it is. Why don’t we say it’s a very primitive society, and they use horses and wagons and very primitive buildings?’ And that’s what we did.” Production designer William Creber based his revised concept drawings for the simian community on what he described as “a troglodyte city” carved into mountains in Turkey.

The greatest alteration, however, was the relocation of the book’s action from an alien planet with its own simian civilisation, to a devastated, post-holocaust Earth of the far future, 2,000 years after a nuclear war has wiped almost all traces of mankind from the face of the planet, allowing simians to become the dominant race. The terrible truth would be revealed to Taylor in the last shot of the film, when his journey into the ‘Forbidden Zone’ leads to the discovery of the wrecked Statue of Liberty, half-submerged in the desolate wasteland which is all that remains of New York City, circa 3955 AD. Although the credit for this devastating idea has been attributed to — or appropriated by — just about everyone involved with the picture, Jacobs claimed that it came to him during an informal development meeting with Blake Edwards at a Burbank delicatessen. “As we walked out, we looked up, and there’s this big Statue of Liberty on the wall of the delicatessen,” he said. “If we never had lunch in that delicatessen, I doubt that we would have had the Statue of Liberty at the end of the picture.” Jacobs further claimed that Boulle thought the twist was “more inventive than his own ending, and wished that he had thought of it when he wrote the book.” Boulle remembered it differently. “I disliked, somewhat, the ending that was used,” he said, referring to perhaps the greatest coup de thèâtre in the history of cinema. “Personally, I preferred my own.”

Premièred on 8 February 1968, Planet of the Apes was a critical and commercial smash, grossing a staggering $26 million — more than four times the production budget of $5.8 million. “It not only grossed enormous numbers, it created a new film genre: the space opera,” Heston said later. “Fantasies set in outer space had long been a staple of the comic strips and Saturday-morning kiddie TV, but had been disdained by Hollywood,” he added, possibly explaining the studios’ initial reluctance to green-light the project. Planet of the Apes endured one of the most prolonged and difficult development periods of any film, only to become one of the biggest successes of the year — and a virtual lifesaver for 20th Century Fox, which, less than a year earlier, had lost a fortune, even by today’s standards, on the epic costume drama Cleopatra. The following year, as the first of four sequels was going into production, Planet of the Apes received two Academy Award nominations, famously beating out the monkey make-up of 2001: A Space Odyssey to earn a special Oscar.

Although a number of reasons were cited for Apes’ across-the-board appeal, it was obvious that the film worked on at least two distinct levels. “Whether by design or accident, [it] had this double appeal,” explained Maurice Evans, who ended up playing Dr Zaius in the film, and returned in the first sequel. “The appeal to youngsters [was] as a pure science fiction film, but it had a message to deliver which apparently communicated very clearly to the adult audience.” But had Schaffner set out to make a sci-fi action adventure with an intriguing premise and an unbeatable twist, or a Swiftian satire with a polemical commentary on the politically turbulent times of the late 1960s? “I had never thought of this picture in terms of being science fiction,” Schaffner asserted, echoing Pierre Boulle’s opinion of his original novel. “It was a political film.” Indeed, Planet of the Apes can perhaps be viewed as symbolically similar to its most famous image, the Statue of Liberty itself: an uncomplicated political message delivered to a mass audience via a populist medium.

The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was released in 1970, followed by another in each of the following three years: Escape From the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Two television series followed: Planet of the Apes in 1974 and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes in 1975, by which time the entire concept seemed to have been driven to extinction.

Nevertheless, barely two decades later, Zanuck’s “Make the picture” evolved into a different imperative: to remake the picture. Yet the film which Batman director Tim Burton was to bring to the screen in 2001 originally began not as a remake — or a “re-imagining”, as the spin doctors in 20th Century Fox’s marketing department euphemised — but as a sequel. In 1988, a twenty-one year-old film-maker called Adam Rifkin made a low budget teen flick entitled Never on Tuesday, with cameos by Nicolas Cage, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Although barely released and seen by few, the film so impressed Fox president Craig Baumgarten that he invited the young auteur to pitch anything he wanted to make. Instead, Rifkin pitched something he wanted to remake. “I had always been a huge Planet of the Apes fan,” he says, “and when Craig asked me if I had any ideas for the studio I immediately pitched him on bringing back the Apes. Having independent film experience, I promised I could write and direct a huge-looking film for a reasonable price, like the sequel to Alien.” Although made for a paltry $18 million, James Cameron’s Aliens looks like it cost five times that sum, and became a huge success for the studio.

Instead of pitching a story which Fox might then ask him to turn into a screenplay, Rifkin took the unusual step of pitching the trailer: “It would open on a barren desert, sand to the horizon. Then a dot would appear in the distance — very Lawrence of Arabia. A craggy narrator would begin telling the cryptic tale of a long forgotten race, decimated by turmoil, strife, war. All the while the dot is getting closer. It’s a shrouded man on horseback. Wearing all black, scarves hide his face from the buffeting sand. Closer and closer he rides, the narrator’s words growing in intensity. Finally, as the storyteller’s words apex with some corny, critical, euphemistic phrase, like “... and now, from out of the sand, they’re back!” the Horseman at that moment would ride into close-up. His horse would rear just as he pulled off his scarf to reveal the face of a gorilla, bellowing a deafening war cry. The camera would then ascend up over the ape’s head to reveal an army of thousands of apes on horseback charging over the horizon.

Rifkin says that Baumgarten commissioned him to write what amounted to a sequel, “but not a sequel to the fifth film, an alternate sequel to the first film. I had pretty much decided that all anybody really remembered was some random imagery from the first film,” Rifkin explains, “particularly the end scene on the beach. All the other films were just a blur. Fox agreed, and that’s why it was decided to branch the franchise off in the direction that we did.” Rifkin describes his version as “Spartacus with apes. The film would open on the last scene from the first film where Charlton Heston was screaming up at the Statue of Liberty, then fade to black. A card would read: ‘300 years later’. When we would fade up, the ape empire had reached its Roman era. A descendant of Heston would eventually lead a human slave revolt against the oppressive Roman-esque apes. A real sword and sandal spectacular, monkey style.”

“The legend throughout the humans is this one man who came from space,” Rifkin elaborated to Creative Screenwriting magazine, “so our descendant takes on that cause.” At the same time, a power struggle has erupted within the ape empire, with gorillas and chimpanzees hovering on the brink of civil war for dominance of the planet. “The general of the gorilla army stages this coup d’ètat, slaughters a bunch of orang-utans, and takes control of the ape empire politics. In a way,” he added, “Gladiator did the same movie without the ape costumes.” Rifkin says that 20th Century Fox loved the draft. “Fox was dead set on making this movie, and fast. Their marketing department went nuts for the idea of bringing back Apes, which just fuelled Craig’s determination to get it into production as fast as possible.” The studio’s only request was to shorten the draft by ten or so pages, a decision he says was based more on budget concerns than creative ones. “As soon as I was to turn in the cut-down script we were to commence official pre-production. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I couldn’t believe it.” Rifkin was set to direct, with Academy Award-winning make-up man Rick Baker working on the apes, Danny Elfman (Batman) composing the score, “and possibly Tom Cruise or Charlie Sheen to play the young slave. Both were hot young actors at the time and were pretty much neck and neck as far as who would turn out to be the bigger star. I can’t accurately describe in words the utter euphoria I felt at knowing that I, Adam Rifkin, was going to be resurrecting Planet of the Apes,” he adds. “It all seemed too good to be true. I soon found out that, of course, it was.”

Days before the film was to commence pre-production, Craig Baumgarten was “quite unexpectedly and unceremoniously replaced” by what Rifkin describes as “a succession of new studio heads. Though the new heads of the studio didn’t specifically kill the project, the momentum certainly shifted from active pre-production to active development. Many new drafts were commissioned and it seemed for a while like the simple Spartacus parallel that I had originally intended was beginning to lose its focus and shape.” One bone of contention was that, like the original film, Rifkin’s script ended on a pessimistic note. “[Fox wanted] a happy, harmonious ending between apes and humans, this ‘we can all finally live together’ happy ending, which I always thought was a bad idea,” Rifkin told Creative Screenwriting. “I thought it was a little corny, because you want a hopeful ending for the characters you care about, but you still want there to be the tension between the apes and the humans for all the [proposed] sequels.”

As the script went through draft after draft, the hope of Rifkin being allowed behind the camera seemed to fade. “Eventually the script evolved to a place where, though different than the original idea, I actually liked it again. Somehow, through all this development, ideas hatched that otherwise would have never been thought of. I was excited again. But alas,” he says, “it wasn’t meant to be. Eventually, as is so often the case in studio development, my Planet of the Apes just died on the vine. There was no grand deceitful moment, or imposing closed door meeting that put the final nail in its coffin. Trends shift, culture changes, new ideas replace old ones and what once seemed like a great idea to a studio and its marketing department now seemed like old news.” Although he would obviously have preferred to have seen the project through, Rifkin (whose career has since included writing Mouse Hunt and directing Detroit Rock City) says he has no hard feelings: “It was my first studio job, and was a valuable personal and professional experience all the way around. It enabled me to join the Writers Guild and opened other Hollywood doors as well. All in all it was a wonderful project to be a part of, if only for a brief moment.”

It was to be several years before Fox resurrected the idea of remaking Planet of the Apes, this time when Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, who produced Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, became involved. Says Murphy, “I called [Fox executive] Peter Rice, who was and is a good friend of mine, and said, ‘I have to do this. What do I gotta do?’ And he said, ‘You gotta find a director. Why don’t you find somebody interesting, like Sam Raimi?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I don’t know how to get to Sam Raimi, and I’m not sure he’s the right guy anyway.’ And he said, ‘Well, fuck, why don’t you walk down the hall and ask Oliver?’ So I walked down the hall and asked Oliver... and he didn’t say ‘No.’” He didn’t exactly say “Yes,” either. According to the account in Jane Hamsher’s book Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade, Stone may not have known what he got himself into. “I imagine the conversation going something like this,” Hamsher wrote. “‘So, Oliver, Planet of the Apes,’ says Don. ‘What about it?’ says Oliver. ‘Do you like it?’ says Don. ‘Um, sure,’ says Oliver... ‘So, if I could get us involved, you’d like that, huh?’ says Don. ‘Huh? Sure, Don, whatever,’ says Oliver.” According to Hamsher, Rice responded by saying that he would only be interested if Stone would direct. “What we don’t want is an expensive executive producer.” Murphy said to leave it to him.

Before long, a top-heavy meeting was arranged at the offices of Stone’s production company, Ixtlan, with everyone present from Fox president of production Tom Jacobson, and going down through the ranks of vice presidents all the way to Rice — on whose shoulders the whole experience (not to mention his future career) was resting. What Stone said first caught everyone by surprise. “I watched the original movies again a couple of nights ago, and they were awful,” he told a stunned boardroom. “I’m only here because of Don Murphy. You should talk to him.” As Hamsher recalled, “[What followed] was the most dreadful silence I’ve ever heard in a room. Oliver had clearly gotten wind of all of Don’s shenanigans in the process, and was now hanging him out to dry.” Murphy apparently did his best to encourage the executives on the basis of marketing potential merchandising tie-ins, McDonald’s Happy Meals and the like, but it was abundantly clear that there was no idea, no pitch, to back up the generalisations and jargon. “The collective embarrassment level in the room was quantumly higher than anything I’ve ever registered before in my life,” Hamsher went on. “When suddenly, Oliver seemed to tune into something.”

Stone — who had mixed politics and science fiction in the television series Wild Palms, and written an unproduced adaptation of Alfred Bester’s sci-fi novel The Demolished Man — had apparently become intrigued by the prospect of time being circular, not linear, with no difference between the past and the future. “What if there were discovered cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who held the secret numeric codes to the Bible that foretold the end of civilization?” he wondered. His interpretation of Planet of the Apes would, as he later told Empire, be “a sci-fi movie that deals with the past versus the future. My concept is that there’s a code inscribed in the Bible that predicts all historical events. The apes were there at the beginning and figured it all out.” Nevertheless, he added evasively, “I don’t want to say too much, except that the stars will be hairy.”

According to Hamsher, Fox thought almost as much of Stone’s ideas as Stone himself did. Thus, wrote Hamsher, “Oliver Stone got Fox to take exactly what they didn’t want on the project — an expensive executive producer. They called the next day and offered him a million dollars to do just that.” When the project was announced in Variety in late 1993, Hamsher sounded more confident than she felt about Stone’s approach. “Oliver’s notion is kind of in the Joseph Campbell-mytho [sic] vein,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s about what a separate, parallel planet might be. He’s reinvented the story with a contemporary scientist going back in time to this simian universe.” Although news that Oliver Stone might direct a new Planet of the Apes spread like wildfire, Murphy says that was never the intention — “he may have led Fox to believe that, so we could do the deal, but no” — and that he only ever intended to executive produce the film. Nevertheless, Hamsher asserts that Stone was enthusiastic about the project. Murphy agrees: “I think Oliver saw there was a very exciting story to be told and a very exciting concept in a very exciting world.” Soon the director was working closely with British-born screenwriter Terry Hayes, who had scripted two Mad Max sequels and Dead Calm, on a brand new screenplay.

Entitled Return of the Apes, the script opens in the present day with a plague that causes human infants to be stillborn — within six months, there won’t be a live birth on the planet, signalling the end of the human race. Geneticist Will Robinson discovers that the plague is a genetic time bomb embedded in human ‘mitochondrial DNA’ 102,000 years earlier. Hoping to save mankind, he uses a unique form of genetic time travel to journey back to a time when Palaeolithic humans were locked in a battle for the future of the planet with highly-evolved apes, one of whom plans to defeat the humans with the plague that will ensure ape dominance over Earth. Will and Billie Rae Diamond, a pregnant colleague who follows him back in time, soon discover that a young human girl named Aiv is the next step in Homo sapiens’ evolution, and they embark on a race against time to protect her from the virus, thus ensuring the survival of the human race 102,000 years hence. Hayes’ ending is bittersweet: Billie Rae ultimately gives birth to a healthy baby boy, Adam, whose future coupling with Aiv (pronounced ‘Eve’) will effectively found the human race; however, Will and Billie Rae are unable to return to the future. (“I never worked out how to get back,” Will confesses. “Give me some credit,” Billie Rae retorts. “I’m a scientist — I knew that.”) The closing image riffs on the ending of the original film, as Will builds a replica of the Statue of Liberty’s head, “to make sure we never forget where we came from.”

According to Hamsher, Fox chairman Peter Chernin subsequently described Return of the Apes as “one of the best scripts he ever read.” Yet Dylan Sellers, one of the lesser executives steering the project through Fox, thought it could be improved. “What if our main guy finds himself in Ape land, and the Apes are trying to play a game like baseball, but they’re missing one element, like the pitcher or something,” he suggested. “And when our guy comes along, he knows what they’re missing, and he shows them, and they all start playing.” In a style which is customary in such meetings, everyone agreed that it would be a great idea, while secretly having no intention of including it, or anything like it. In the meantime, two 700-pound gorillas became attached to the project: one was Australian director Phillip Noyce — who had helmed Hayes’ Dead Calm and the Jack Ryan blockbusters Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games; the other was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the kind of star the studio needed to justify the film’s considerable budget. Although he appeared better suited to the Charlton Heston role in a more straightforward remake of the original — a suggestion reinforced by his interest in reprising the Heston role in a mooted remake of The Ωmega Man — Schwarzenegger loved Hayes’ script; furthermore, he would only work with ‘A-list’ directors, and Noyce was one of them. “At one point,” Murphy recalls, “I was in the biggest meeting I’ve ever been in, with Peter Chernin, the head of the studio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Phillip Noyce to direct based on a Terry Hayes first draft; me and my ex-partner Jane to produce and Oliver Stone to executive produce, and that was all looking pretty damn good.”

Sellers refused to give up his baseball scene, however, perhaps aware that he ought to put his stamp on the project, for better or worse, in order to justify his involvement in the process. (This tendency among executives is best exemplified by the clichè, “This script is perfect. Who can we get to rewrite it?”) Thus, when Hayes handed in his next draft — sans baseball — Sellers fired him, a move Hamsher described as “incredibly stupid”, not least because Hayes and Noyce had remained friends since they collaborated on Dead Calm several years earlier. As a result, Noyce moved on. Understandably, Fox became frustrated by the distance between Fox’s approach and Hayes’ interpretation of Oliver Stone’s ideas — as Murphy put it, “Terry wrote a Terminator, and Fox wanted The Flintstones” — and, perhaps feeling that they were not getting the full value of their million dollars from Stone, decided to take back the reins. Suddenly, says Murphy, “it turned into a whole political thing, and before you knew it we were going nowhere.” Several events occurred in rapid succession: Stone went off to pursue projects of his own; Tom Rothman replaced Tom Jacobson as head of production; a drunken Dylan Sellers crashed his car, killing a much-loved colleague and earning himself jail time; and Murphy and Hamsher were paid off.

“After they got rid of us, they brought on Chris Columbus,” says Murphy, referring to the writer of Gremlins and Home Alone, and director of Mrs Doubtfire. “Then I heard they did tests of apes skiing, which sounded pretty ludicrous to me.” Having recently failed to get a film based on Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four off the ground at Fox, Columbus teamed up with that project’s screenwriter — Batman scribe Sam Hamm — for a new, kiddie-friendly version of Planet of the Apes. As Hamm told Creative Screenwriting, “What we tried to do was a story that would be simultaneously an homage to the elements we liked from the original series, and would also incorporate a lot of material from [Pierre Boulle’s novel] that had been jettisoned from the earlier production. The first half of the script bears very little resemblance to the book, but a lot of the stuff in the second half comes directly from it, or is directly inspired by it.”

Hamm’s script borrowed Hayes’ device of the baby-killing virus, this time brought to Earth by an ape astronaut, whose spacecraft crashes in New York harbour. Nine months later, babies throughout the world are being born prematurely aged, dying within hours of their birth, and it is up to Dr Susan Landis, who works for the Center for Disease Control, and Alexander Troy, a scientist based at Area 51, to use the ape’s spacecraft to return to the virus’ planet of origin, hoping to find an antidote. Instead, they find an urban environment, similar to that described in Boulle’s novel, with apes in three-piece suits armed with heavy weapons, helicopters and the other trappings of civilisation — all used to hunt humans. Landis and Troy discover the antidote and return to Earth, only to find that in their seventy-four year absence, the apes have taken over the planet. Once again, Hamm puts an ironic twist on the Statue of Liberty ending, revealing a statue whose “once-proud porcelain features have been crudely chiselled into the grotesque likeness of a great grinning ape.”

Although Arnold Schwarzenegger remained attached to the new script, Fox was still not convinced that this was the version they wanted to make. And when Columbus subsequently quit the project following the death of his mother, James Cameron began talks (during the filming of Titanic) about the possibility of writing and producing — but not directing — a new version, drawing on elements of the original film and its first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. “Schwarzenegger... is talking with Jim Cameron on 20th Fox’s Planet of the Apes,” Variety columnist Army Archerd wrote in January 1997. “Arnold tells me Stan Winston has already created amazing apes... and although [Cameron]’s banner, Lightstorm Entertainment, does not have a ‘formal arrangement’ with 20th on Apes, it’s anticipated he will produce it. He loves the project and the franchise.”

Given their history together — two Terminator films and the mega-hit True Lies — it seemed more likely than ever that Schwarzenegger would remain aboard, but in the wake of Titanic’s critical and commercial success, Cameron began to re-think his future. “I’m forty-four,” he said in November 1998. “I make a movie every two or three years — it should be something that I create. I’ve always done that, with the exception of Aliens. The Terminator was my creation, so were Titanic and The Abyss. With the amount of time and energy that I put into a film, it shouldn’t be somebody else’s [idea]. I don’t want to labour in somebody else’s house.” Of his possible interpretation, “I would have gone in a very different direction,” is all Cameron would say. With Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich and a pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson all declining a proffered place in the director’s chair, Planet of the Apes was back to square one.

By the summer of 1999, the studio that had revived the science fiction genre in the early nineties with Independence Day and The X-Files was busy ruling the planet with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and the prospect of a new Planet of the Apes reared its head once again. At around this time, American-Armenian producer-director twins Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) became intrigued by the idea of making a new version of Apes. “The original movie is about race in America,” Albert told Empire later. “[Ours] would have been more socially significant and would have been more reality-based [than the 2001 version].” Added Allen, “We wanted to take the premise and revamp certain elements. But From Hell had a green light and we hadn’t worked in five years. I think they didn’t really want us to do Planet of the Apes anyway.” (“I don’t think the Hughes brothers had anything more than a conversation with Fox,” says Don Murphy, who produced From Hell, which was written by Terry Hayes.)

In the meantime, the studio hired screenwriter William Broyles Jr, who marooned Tom Hanks in space in Apollo 13 and on a desert island in Cast Away, to write what amounted to a third story about a man stranded far from home. As Broyles told Creative Screenwriting, “[Fox president] Tom Rothman called and said, ‘Look, would you like to do Planet of the Apes?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And then he called back and said, ‘Well, you could really do whatever you wanted [with the project].’ And I said, ‘No.’ Then I went outside. I was looking at the stars and thought, ‘You know, this could be fun!’ Because with this kind of imaginative science fiction, you can deal with themes that are hard to deal with in a more realistic movie. And there was no producer. There was nobody to tell me anything I had to put in or not put in. It was an interesting act of faith on Fox’s part just to give me a blank piece of paper and say, ‘Go for it.’” Aside from a projected release date — the summer of 2001 — there were, he said, “zero parameters. That was the fun thing about it. [They said,] ‘Don’t read any of the earlier scripts. Don’t feel limited by the previous series. Just follow your imagination.’ It was a completely blank slate.” At one point, Broyles called Rothman, demonstrating the extent of his departure from previous versions with a single question: “Does it have to be apes?” He was only half joking.

Broyles sent Fox an outline and a chronicle of the fictional planet that would be the setting for his version, before beginning to work on a first draft. Entitled The Visitor, and billed as “episode one in the Chronicles of Aschlar,” it was conceived as the first of three movies in a whole new cycle. Although it was pointedly not set on Earth, in other respects his story — in which an astronaut crash-lands on a world of civilised apes and enslaved humans — remains faithful to the basic structure of the original, although Broyles ups the ante by having a powerful chimpanzee named General Thade (an anagram of ‘death’) plotting the genocide of the human race. A subsequent draft grabbed the attention not only of original Planet of the Apes producer Richard D. Zanuck, who signed on to produce the new version, but also director Tim Burton, fresh from the sleeper hit Sleepy Hollow. “I wasn’t interested in doing a remake or a sequel of the original Planet of the Apes film,” Burton said later. “But I was intrigued by the idea of revisiting that world. Like a lot of people, I was affected by the original. It’s like a good myth or fairy tale that stays with you. The idea of re-imagining that mythology [was] very exciting to me.” This “re-imagining” would, he said, “introduce new characters and other story elements, keeping the essence of the original but inhabiting that world in a different way.” After more than a decade in Development Hell, Zanuck suddenly felt that Burton was the right director to bring Planet of the Apes to a new generation of moviegoers. “When you say ‘Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Tim Burton’ in the same breath, that idea is instantly explosive, like lightning on the screen,” he said. “All of Tim’s films are highly imaginative and highly visual. I can’t think of a more perfect pairing than Tim Burton and Planet of the Apes. It spells magic to me.” Burton’s box office credibility, which had taken a knock with Mars Attacks!, had bounced back with Sleepy Hollow; equally importantly, he was available, having spent a year developing a Superman film for Warner Bros which failed to materialize.

Under Burton’s direction, Broyles wrote another draft which, the writer says, was much closer to the finished film. “Some of the more complex themes of time and destiny that I had in the original draft [were lost],” he explained. “But the heart of them is still there. They were the same things, just more complex versions of them. Riddles of time and destiny that I had to the third power are now just to the second power.” When budgetary concerns began to intrude — Burton famously stated that, as scripted, Broyles’ version “would cost $300 million” — Fox brought in Mark Rosenthal and Larry Konner, who had previously scripted another ape-related remake, Mighty Joe Young. “[Broyles] came up with the characters pretty much as they are,” said Zanuck, “but his script was impractical in many respects. It had monsters in it, all kinds of other things. We wanted to go back to the basic element — the upside-down world.” As Burton said in his sparse DVD commentary, “We did some work on the script after I got it, basically because of budget, but also because it helps the script. Because you read things, and it’s kind of like a radio programme — if you actually were to see it, it would be too much. So therefore that process of bringing it down, I think, was actually good for it in some ways.” Rosenthal and Konner worked with Burton throughout pre-production, and share the final writing credits with Broyles. “I have a lot of respect for the work they did,” Broyles said of Konner and Rosenthal, “and think that given what I’d done and given what Tim wanted, they navigated the right course.”

This is more than can be said for astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), who crash lands his egg-like spacecraft on a strange world in the distant future, where intelligent lower primates, evolved from chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, have enslaved humans, who now live like neanderthals. Tim Roth, Paul Giamatti, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, David Warner and Burton’s then-girlfriend, Lisa Marie, were among those required to don Rick Baker’s ape make-up, yet none had quite the frisson of original Planet of the Apes star Charlton Heston’s cameo as Thade’s father. “I was so happy when Heston said yes to this, because the circular nature, or the reversal nature of the material that he came to do this as an ape was amazing. He’s so much a part of the Planet of the Apes mythology, he was a part of what made that movie work, the intensity and weirdness and strength.”

Despite the thirteen years, manifold drafts and numerous directors which came and went between the unproduced Adam Rifkin version and Tim Burton’s interpretation, Don Murphy denies the notion that the film was in Development Hell. “I suppose it was, in a way,” he allows, “but it really wasn’t. What happened was they tried to reboot it with Rifkin. Then some years later they tried to reboot it with us. Our reboot led them to believe they had something big there, and that led to trying to get other directors interested. Looking back,” he adds, “at the time we may have been a little bit over our heads. It became a really big thing pretty freaking fast. Everybody started to try to grab onto it. And we were soon out! I would do things differently today, but... that’s just the way it is.” Like many, Murphy was disappointed with the final film. “I thought it was gonna be fantastic,” he says, “like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The movie they actually made was a bad Twilight Zone episode.”

By all accounts, including his own, the production of Planet of the Apes was a bruising experience for Burton, largely because the targeted release date, July 2001, meant that everything from pre-production to editing and effects work was rushed. “Tim had three months to edit the film where he’d normally spend a year, so there were a lot of elements that were shot that were missing,” actress Estella Warren told Arena. Yet problems began long before shooting started. “I’m fascinated by the studio technique that sort of leaves you bloodied, beaten and left for dead right before you’re supposed to go out and make a great movie for them,” Burton told The Independent newspaper. “They give you a script,” he added, “and you do a budget based on that, and say, ‘This movie would cost $300 million to make,’ and then they treat you like a crazy, overspending, crazy person! It’s like, ‘Well, you gave me the script!’” Asked by the same interviewer whether he’d like to make a sequel, Burton’s response was simple: “I’d rather jump out of the window.” Nevertheless, despite withering reviews, the film grossed a record-breaking $68.5 million on its opening weekend, the second highest opening of 2001, with a total worldwide gross of $362,211,740. For one summer, just as the tagline suggested, Apes really did ‘rule the planet’.

Heston’s casting was one way in which Burton attempted to recapture the magic of the original 1968 production; he also needed a killer ‘twist’ ending — which were, after The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Others, fashionable again in the period Burton’s Planet of the Apes was made. “We always hoped for something like that, and I did a version of it which they then expanded on,” said Broyles. Thus, when Captain Davidson escapes the planet of the apes at the climax of the story and returns to Earth, he finds that apes now rule the planet. It was cool, but it didn’t make a lick of sense. “Can I explain the Planet of the Apes ending? No,” admitted Tim Roth, who played General Thade. “I’ve seen it twice and I don’t understand anything.” Commented Broyles, “The ending [should] be viewed in proportion to the rest of the movie, not as some huge, big pay-off, but as fitting with the story itself.” “I thought it made sense. Kind of,” Helena Bonham Carter told Total Film. “I don’t understand why everyone went, ‘Huh?’ It’s all a time warp thing, isn’t it? He’s gone back and he realises Thade’s beat him there. Everyone’s so pedantic,” she added. “You start bringing logic to an ape film, it’s always dodgy.”

If audiences had difficulty getting their heads around the ending, trying to make sense of Burton’s explanation would prove equally tricky. “Let’s say Fox wants to make another movie. If I explain this ending, it kind of screws up other things. It’s thought out enough to where it could be explained, but if I want to start explaining it, it might damage things. Even not wanting to do another movie, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for somebody else that might. So I can just say that it’s been thought out, there’s a thought to it, but... you can figure some things out through the film, but... Part of what happens is... Part of it for me was ending up on an image that has a big question mark on it. Sometimes I like to do something, and I think it’s sometimes as a reaction to other things... To me, somebody going back and landing in a place he thinks he’s at, and then finding out he’s not there, that to me is logical. There’s a logic to that. There’s less logic to exactly know what he’s going back to, so I actually had no problem... I’m not quite sure what people were responding to because I had no problem with the ending. There were several elements that needed to happen, one of them was an image I had of complete reversal, which I felt was somehow weird and compelling to me, so if they do another movie, the movie is about sort of finding things out, sort of...”

Burton’s view proved quite prophetic: within five years, Fox was developing a new Planet of the Apes film which was neither a sequel nor another re-imagining, but a prequel to the entire story, based on an imaginative pitch by husband and wife screenwriting team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the latter best known as author of the smash hit The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). “Rick has always kept a file of articles and ideas to look at for inspiration,” Silver told the Planet of the Apes fan site The Forbidden Zone, “and when we were in between projects, in 2006, Rick had some articles about chimps that had been raised as humans at home, and how that had always come to trouble, for the chimps and the humans. He knew there was some kind of thriller there, and all of a sudden he had this light-bulb moment, and he said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Planet of the Apes!’ He had an idea to re-boot Planet of the Apes... and he started talking about this chimp raised at home as if he was a little boy, and before we knew it, we were both in love with this little chimp named Caesar.” Jaffa and Silver had no idea of Fox’s plans for the Planet of the Apes franchise, but pitched the bare outlines of the idea to their friend, Fox executive Peter Kang, who pitched it to president of production Hutch Parker. Jaffa and Silver subsequently wrote two years’ worth of drafts, before Scott Frank, screenwriter of three Fox films (Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix and Marley & Me), came aboard as director. “We did two drafts for Scott,” says Jaffa, “and then he told Fox he’d like to take a crack at the script. So then he went off and did a draft as writer-director, and that subsequently did not work out and they moved on and ultimately came back to us. We brought the story back to where it was before Scott started writing.”

Without realizing it, Jaffa and Silver had set themselves a breathtakingly ambitious goal: to tell the origin story of the entire Planet of the Apes franchise, primarily by dealing with the two key questions: firstly, where did the intelligent, talking apes come from; secondly, where did all the people go? “We said, ‘Let’s look at what’s going on in the world right now in terms of culture and science, that certain dominoes could line up, and if they should touch each other in just the right way, apes would take over the planet. And let’s try to tell that story, but also use the Planet of the Apes mythology to do that.” Directed by Rupert Wyatt, best known in his native England for well-received prison drama The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes[1] tells the story of Will (Academy Award nominee James Franco), a scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, who injects Caesar, a baby chimpanzee, with an experimental serum, unwittingly sparking a chain of events which unleashes an army of intelligent apes on San Francisco. Although the film bore superficial similarities to certain events from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Jaffa and Silver claimed this was coincidental. As Jaffa explained to Entertainment Weekly, “We laid out the story and pitched the idea to Fox, and had gotten hired, and okayed to write and produce this thing. It was at that point we went back and started studying the old movies. We already had the movie laid out. I think some of the connections to Conquest are on purpose,” he added, “but others are coincidental. ‘Unlikely character becoming a leader and leading his people to freedom’ — it’s also a Moses story.”

In the run-up to its release on 7 August 2011, Fox predicted that Rise of the Planet of the Apes would gross somewhere in the neighbourhood of $35 million in its opening weekend; as it turned out, the film vastly exceeded the studio’s expectations, grossing nearly $55 million — and almost the same again the following weekend. A sequel to the prequel was not only likely, but certain. “When we started this,” Silver told Entertainment Weekly, “we knew that this movie would stand on its own, and we designed it that way. But... we pictured a trilogy that would start with this movie. We definitely have ideas for where the sequel — plural, where the sequels — would take us.”

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1 The original title, Rise of the Apes, was changed in the run-up to release, as Fox felt audiences may not realize it was intended as part of the Planet of the Apes franchise.

CAST INTO MOUNT DOOM

Paths not taken on the road to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings

“When Gandalf is vanquished, the text is ‘He fell beyond time and memory’. We puzzled about how you put that on film.”

— director John Boorman on his proposed adaptation

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With these words, impulsively scribbled on a piece of paper by thirty-eight year-old Oxford languages professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the greatest fantasy epic in the history of literature was born. Although The Hobbit, as the resulting story would eventually be titled, was written largely for Tolkien’s own children, it found its way to publisher Allen & Unwin, and appeared in 1937. It sold well; well enough that Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel. Thirteen years later, ‘J.R.R.’ Tolkien, renowned as a perfectionist and self-professed procrastinator, was ready to deliver it. “My work has escaped from my control,” he wrote to his publisher in 1950, “and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” Its title was The Lord of the Rings.

It was a further four years before Allen & Unwin finally published the book, an epic saga set in a fictional world called Middle-Earth. Divided, much to the author’s annoyance, into three parts entitled The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, the book sold moderately well, particularly for a thousand-page trilogy of hardcover doorstops which, unable to fit comfortably into any existing genre, had invented one all its own. Nevertheless, it did not begin to enjoy the kind of success one can describe as phenomenal until the mid-1960s, when Ace Books (home of Philip K. Dick and Tolkien-inspired fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin) and Ballantine published rival editions of the book. By this time, American youth was in the midst of being caught up in hippie culture, and the quiet Oxford don suddenly found his story about hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards selling hundreds of thousands of copies per month, and becoming — almost overnight — required reading for a generation of psychedelic explorers.

With a vast readership stretching from middle England to the Midwestern United States, one would have expected Hollywood to come knocking on the door of his study, the cigar smoke of a producer mingling with that of Tolkien’s beloved pipe as he signed away the film rights to his masterpiece. In fact, Hollywood had been ahead of the curve, with Hugo award-winning science fiction fan, writer and magazine editor Forrest J Ackerman — the man credited with being the first to abbreviate science fiction to ‘sci-fi’ — approaching Tolkien as early as 1957. Ackerman made his appeal in person, flying to London and taking the train to Oxford. “I had no sooner landed in London than an hour later I was in the drawing room of Professor Tolkien,” he recalls. “There were two young lady fans who went with me. The Professor talked to us with a pipe in his mouth, and holding his head kind of down, and a very thick accent, and when the two girls and I got back on the train we were saying, ‘What did he say? Did you understand anything?’ We only understood about one word in five!” Nevertheless, he adds, “He gave me permission for a year to try to find a movie producer for it.”

Ackerman’s ambitious plan was to make a live-action film, rather than taking the animated approach Tolkien would have preferred. “I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization,” Tolkien wrote to his publisher Rayner Unwin on 19 June 1957, “and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.” Referring to an earlier bowdlerization of the book for a dramatised reading produced for radio by the BBC, he added, “I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC.” Although a writing associate of Ackerman’s, Morton Grady Zimmerman, set to work on a treatment for the proposed film, while production designer Ron Cobb began scouting suitable locations in California, Ackerman found it difficult to interest the few producers he knew in such an ambitious undertaking. “I had gone to school with James Nicholson, who was the president of American International Pictures, and I thought perhaps that he would be interested,” he says, “but the scope was too great for him. I no longer recall just who else I approached, but nobody obviously was prepared to produce it at that time.”

In April 1958, Tolkien admitted in a letter to Unwin that he was “entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it.” He had recently received Zimmerman’s synopsis of the book, described as a “story-line”, and while Tolkien claimed ignorance of the adaptation process, he did know the difference between a film ‘treatment’ and what he saw as ill treatment. “This document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety,” he wrote, adding that Zimmerman seemed “quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent,” he went on. “He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the [Lord of the Rings] at a great pace, and then constructed his [storyline] from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original.”

Tolkien, a lifelong philologist, was principally peeved with the constant misspelling of Boromir as ‘Borimor,’ but there were other slights, and overall Tolkien felt “very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original.” Nevertheless, there was one redeeming feature about the whole affair, and it was an obvious one. “I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money,” he wrote, referring to his encroaching retirement, and promising to restrain himself, “and avoid all avoidable offence.” In a letter to Ackerman circa June 1958, Tolkien begged understanding of “the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.” Although hardly an avowed cinemagoer, Tolkien understood the medium well enough to note that “the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of an unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” His commentary on Zimmerman’s synopsis was thorough in scope and condemnatory in tone. “He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.”

Bryan Sibley, author of a later (and widely acclaimed) BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and the official ‘making of’ books for Peter Jackson’s trilogy, believes that some of Tolkien’s criticism may have been unfair. “The problem was that, because Tolkien was not a regular moviegoer, he didn’t understand the problems of dramatisation,” he told Starlog. “One of his chief criticisms of [the] treatment was that he had arranged the books in chronological order. It’s actually something that you have to do if you’re going to construct a screenplay out of what is essentially a novel.”

Nevertheless, despite the considerable efforts of Ackerman et al to convince Tolkien that his story was in safe hands, the proposed adaptation withered on the vine, and no firm agreement was ever made. “I think it was just as well,” Ackerman admits, “because it could never have been given the grand treatment that Peter Jackson afforded it.” Ackerman did, however, manage to produce another adaptation of the book. “I edited 200 issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland,” he says, “and the man who produced those issues saw a value in Tolkien. As I recall he had me do a one-shot comic book based on it. I had already created a comic strip character called Vampirella, so he had me create a one-shot on a portion of the Tolkien stories.” There was another, more surprising consolation for Ackerman: a cameo role in Peter Jackson’s early splatter film Braindead, aka Dead Alive.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, work was underway on an animated adaptation of Tolkien’s earlier work, The Hobbit, thanks to the foresight of producer Bill Snyder, who, in 1964, optioned the rights for a period extending to 30 June 1966, handing the task of adaptation to legendary animator Gene Deitch. “After reading the book, I caught the fever,” Deitch recalled in his autobiography How to Succeed in Animation (Don’t Let A Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!), “and intensively began working up a screenplay... The great sweep of the adventure, the fabled landscapes, and the treasure of fantasy characters, made the story a natural for animation.” Incredibly, Deitch and his writing partner, Bill Bernal, were well into the screenplay when they heard, for the first time, of the existence of The Lord of the Rings. “Having assumed there was only The Hobbit to contend with, and following Snyder’s wish, we had taken some liberties with the story that a few years later would be grounds for burning at the stake,” Deitch admitted. These changes included changing some of the characters’ names, playing fast and loose with the plot — even creating a love interest, a Princess, no less — for Bilbo Baggins. Having read The Lord of the Rings, Deitch and Bernal realised that they were dealing with something “far more magnificent” than The Hobbit, and set about retro-fitting elements from the later works into their script, to allow for a potential sequel. They even conceived a ground-breaking animation method they christened ‘ImagiMation’, which would combine cel-animated figures over elaborate 3D model backgrounds, in the style of some techniques pioneered by animation genius Max Fleischer.

In January 1966, Deitch was invited to America to make a presentation to 20th Century Fox. “By the time we arrived, however, Snyder had already blown the deal by asking [Fox] for too much money.” Evidently, word of The Lord of the Rings’ groundswell of success had not reached the ears of Fox executives. By the time they did, Snyder found himself with an ace in the hole: according to the paperwork for the film rights to The Hobbit, all Snyder had to do in order to hold an option, also covering The Lord of the Rings, was produce “a full-colour motion picture version” of The Hobbit by 30 June 1966. Nowhere in the contract did it state that the film must be animated, or feature length, or even produced to a high standard. As a mortified Deitch explained, “All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay — all my previous year’s work — hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within twelve minutes’ running time — one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before 30 June 1966.”

Marshalling a tiny group of friends and associates — a Czech illustrator named Adolf Born, a composer friend named Vaclav Lidl, and an American narrator, Herb Lass — Deitch worked out a simple storyboard, brought to life with paper cutouts photographed with multiple-exposure visual effects and scene continuity, working directly under the camera. Incredibly, the one-reel film was completed on time, and Deitch arrived in New York with the rough answer print a day ahead of schedule. Snyder had already booked a small projection room in midtown Manhattan, and after a quick test screening, Deitch ran downstairs to stop passers-by, asking if they would mind paying ten cents admission to see a new animated film. “After the screening, the few puzzled audience members were asked to sign a paper stating that on this day of 30 June 1966, they had paid admission to see the full-colour animated film The Hobbit. Thus, Snyder’s film rights to the entire J.R.R. Tolkien library were legally extended, and he was immediately able to sell them back for nearly $100,000. My share of this weazled boodle? Zip.”

By now, the book had become one of the publishing sensations of the decade, and every studio in town was clamoring for the film rights. This time, it was another 60s phenomenon — The Beatles — who became linked to the project, a move apparently instigated by John Lennon. “We talked about it for a while,” Paul McCartney told Roy Carr, author of The Beatles at the Movies, “but then I started to smell a bit of a carve-up because, immediately, John wanted the lead.” According to Carr, however, Lennon was interested in the role of Gollum, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr opting for Frodo, Gandalf and Sam respectively. Whether related to The Beatles’ ambitions or not, United Artists successfully acquired the rights to film The Lord of the Rings in the autumn of 1969, for the sum of $250,000.

It was around this time that Heinz Edelmann, designer and art director of The Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine, became interested in pursuing the idea of an animated adaptation. At the time, Edelmann was doubtful that stories of action, suspense and thrills could be depicted as straight animation, and proposed to make the film “as a kind of opera, or a sort of operatic impression”, more closely related to Disney’s Fantasia than, say, The Sword in the Stone. He intended to approach it “As one does an operatic version of any book,” he told Outrè magazine, “[to] sort of try for a distillation of the mood and the story, but not follow every twist of the plot.” For instance, “One could have packed 300 pages of wandering into a five-minute sequence set to music.”

Edelmann has said that his version of The Lord of the Rings would not have been stylistically similar to Yellow Submarine: “The artwork would have been completely different: much less colour, and unrealistic, but without the art nouveau touch Yellow Submarine has.” Neither did Tolkien’s original illustrations for the book, which were all based on medieval art, appeal to Edelmann, who saw the story more in terms of an Akira Kurosawa film. “If you look at all the fantasy films done in the last thirty years,” he said in 2001, “there is a strong Japanese ethnic influence in the staging, in the buildings, and especially in the costumes. I think at that time we might have been the first to think in those terms. The Lord of the Rings is such a classic right now that almost no artistic freedom is possible. Back at that time, when it was new and Tolkien was still alive, it would have been a contemporary version, and I think that would have given us much more artistic freedom.” Nevertheless, he added, “I would have loved to have done it. Sometimes I do still think about it, but it would have been an awful amount of work. Maybe it’s better that it has remained just a concept.”

Ultimately, United Artists decided that animation was not the best way to proceed, and in June 1970 announced that John Boorman, the young British director who had come to Hollywood’s attention three years earlier with his gritty thriller Point Blank, would helm a live-action version. Boorman had originally wanted to make a movie about the legend of King Arthur, but when United Artists offered him the chance to turn Tolkien’s fantasy tale into reality, he leapt at it, bringing aboard Rospo Pallenberg to work with him on the script. They conceived of several approaches, from a straightforward adaptation, to what Pallenberg later described as “like a Fellini movie in a never-land, or in a big studio, like Moulin Rouge! — sort of all fake.” In the end, a more straightforward approach prevailed, with the studio hoping to combine all three volumes of the book into one film — an endeavour which proved challenging to say the least. “At the time, they produced long movies with an intermission,” Boorman explained. “[The script] is 176 pages with an intermission on page eighty-one, after the Fellowship goes down the rapids, and you have a sense that they have reached a great landscape as the river widens.” After the intermission, “we accelerated as we continued the story, and dropped things out. We were propelled by what we liked, and invented as we went along.”

Among the script’s inventions was the opening, in which the camera would invade J.R.R. Tolkien’s own study, disturbing him at work, followed by a brief history of Middle-Earth, conducted by what Pallenberg described as “a kind of Kabuki play in which the story of Sauron and the creation of the rings was explained to a gathering in Rivendell.” Pallenberg wrote new scenes for several characters, including a love scene between Frodo and Galadriel (husband Celeborn was not featured). He also claimed a particular affinity and sympathy for the dwarf Gimli, for whom he wrote a new scene in which Gimli was buried in a hole and beaten to utter exhaustion in a bid to recover his unconscious ancestral memory, and thereby remember the word necessary to enter Moria and discover other insights about the ancient dwarf kingdom. “I had a rather fanciful idea involving these orcs that are slumbering or in some kind of narcotic state,” he added. “The Fellowship runs over them, and their footsteps start up their hearts. John liked that a lot.” Another original idea was a unique duel between Gandalf and Saruman, inspired by African magicians who duel with words (an idea subsequently explored, incidentally, in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). “It was a way of one entrapping the other as a duel with words rather than special effects flashes, shaking of staves, and all that,” he explained. “I tried to keep away from that a lot, and Boorman did too.”

At the time, the possibility remained that The Beatles might be involved, perhaps even playing the four hobbits, a prospect which Pallenberg relished, despite the fact that it would have been difficult to apply roles to each of the group’s members. “It was presented to me as, ‘Let’s see if we can try and keep the four hobbits on sort of an equal basis — [though] obviously, Frodo was the protagonist — so we did that,” Pallenberg added, opining that Paul McCartney would have been his ideal Frodo. “They were the emotional anchor to the whole piece. We also anchored a lot of the film on how the ring corrupts, and we were fascinated by Tolkien’s idea of ‘stewardship of the land’.”

New Zealand director Peter Jackson, who would bring a live-action Lord of the Rings to the screen thirty years after Boorman’s aborted attempt, sympathised. “When you’re faced with adapting the twelve hundred pages of The Lord of the Rings it’s obviously an incredibly daunting task,” he told the makers of The South Bank Show. “It’s daunting in several ways. One [is that] just as a book, it’s very dense and there’s a lot of characters and it has... layers, [so] that you can scrape away one layer and there’s more information below, and you can scrape that away [and] there’s more information, which is exactly what makes it such a wonderfully beloved book. To somehow translate that particular aspect of the book into film, it’s virtually impossible. What you can do is you can take the story, you can take the characters, and you can make a movie that presents on film the moments that people remember from the book. Tolkien did a lot of things in his story that if you were a film-maker you would choose not to do — it’s as simple as that,” he added. For example, “His villains are very difficult to put onto film. Sauron, his ultimate evil in the story, is unable to take physical form by the time the events of The Lord of the Rings take place, and he manifests himself as a giant flaming eyeball. Now, you know, to have a movie in which your principal villain is a flaming eyeball is not a decision that you would make if you were writing an original screenplay.” Added Boorman, “[We] used to get the giggles about some of the issues. There was one I remember clearly when Gandalf is vanquished. The text is, ‘He fell beyond time and memory’, and we puzzled about how you put that on film.”

Perhaps the biggest hurdles for Boorman to overcome in the process of adapting the book were the technical challenges. Making the hobbits appear smaller than life would have been accomplished with oversized props and locations, and forced perspective. Flying creatures were excised from the story, so that instead of having the Nazgul chief swoop in on a flying steed, it rides a horse with no skin — just exposed, bleeding flesh. “I still have this feeling that the dazzle can take away from the fundamental drama,” Pallenberg suggested. “We always tried to do things on the cheap, simply. When you saw a castle in the distance, it could have been made out of anything — even gleaming, high-voltage transmission towers. You saw those in the distance between the trees, and then suddenly you were inside it. John Boorman is tremendously clever at that.” Nevertheless, Boorman had other ideas that might not have proved so cost-effective, including a model of Middle-Earth so large it would have displayed the curvature of the Earth, and filled an entire studio. Principal photography would most likely have taken place in Ireland (which would have opened up tax incentives for the production), with interiors being shot at Ardmore Studios. Said Pallenberg, “As I drove around, taking breaks from writing, I saw all sorts of places. I remember there was one view that he could pass off as the Shire — it looked down towards a little village that was called Anamoe, I believe.”

The Boorman/Pallenberg script ended poignantly, as Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, Galadriel, Arwen and Elrond sail away from Middle-Earth in a ship. A rainbow appears, prompting Legolas, who is watching from the shore, to remark, “Look — only seven colours. Indeed the world is failing.” Although it sounds like Tolkien, the line is Pallenberg’s own. “From a physics standpoint it’s incorrect to say that there could be more than seven colours,” the writer points out, “but what it’s saying is, ‘We live in a diminished world.’” The end of Boorman and Pallenberg’s year-long endeavour was no less poignant: no sooner had they submitted the script to United Artists than the studio decided it was too risky, too costly or simply not commercially viable, and put it on the back burner. Boorman and Pallenberg had not wasted their efforts, however. A decade later, in 1981, they used the knowledge they had gained during their year of development on the unrealised Tolkien project as the basis for Excalibur, the film about King Arthur which Boorman had set out to make before United Artists persuaded him to consider The Lord of the Rings.

By the time of Tolkien’s death in 1973, word of Boorman’s stalled production had reached Ralph Bakshi, a Brooklyn-born animator best known as the filmmaker who brought Fritz the Cat to the big screen. Says Bakshi, “I was a Tolkien fan, and I thought Lord of the Rings was not only one of my favourite fantasies, but one of my favourite novels. I was doing my own stuff at the time, and I knew Disney were talking about doing it, but the Tolkien family wasn’t happy with their approach, because Disney wanted to make it a musical, tone it down, and make it more palatable for young kids.” Interestingly, both Disney’s archives and legal department dispute the notion that the studio ever pursued an animated feature based on the books. “Then I heard that John Boorman was going to do it live-action for United Artists, and had somehow condensed the three books into one script, which I thought was ridiculous,” Bakshi continues. “So I went to Mike Medavoy at United Artists and told him it should be done in animation, in two or three parts. He said, ‘We’ve spent $3 million on this script we don’t understand. I don’t know if we’re gonna make it.’ So I walked across the lot and talked to Dan Melnick at MGM, who loved the idea and immediately wrote a cheque to buy it from United Artists.”

One might think that Bakshi, whose animated features Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic had both received ‘X’ ratings, was the last person to whom J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate would give their blessing for the first feature film based on his most famous work. Not so, he says. “They had no contractual approval, but I said, ‘Unless they give me the okay I’m not doing it.’ So I went to see Tolkien’s daughter and spent two days discussing how and why I was going to make the film. I said I couldn’t do everything, but the scenes that I could do would be pure Tolkien, both in dialogue and depiction, and she loved that. She took me to the studio where Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, and gave me her blessing, and I got to work.” Chris Conkling wrote the first draft of the screenplay and delivered it on 21 September 1976. This was subsequently revised (in a second draft dated 3 May 1977) by Peter S. Beagle, with the third draft (credited to Conkling, Beagle and Bakshi) being completed on 21 September 1978, exactly two years after the first. In the meantime, however, Dan Melnick had left MGM, and The Lord of the Rings was not a project his replacement wanted to pursue.

Undeterred, Bakshi approached Saul Zaentz, who had financed Fritz the Cat (and had produced Best Picture Academy Award-winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and would later produce another, Amadeus). Zaentz agreed to back the film, which would be divided into two parts. In adapting the books, Bakshi made good on his promise to remain faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, and elected to employ the controversial ‘rotoscoping’ technique — essentially tracing over live action footage — to ground the fantasy in the kind of “nasty realism” he found omnipresent in Tolkien’s work. “His fantasy is grounded in totally realistic terms,” he explains, “and to get that kind of realism I knew I would effectively have to do a live-action picture in animation. I thought rotoscoping was the answer. After all, [Walt] Disney used rotoscoping on every film he did — Snow White and the Prince, every realistic character, every song and dance number in every Disney film was rotoscoped [from performers] in full costume — but he kept it a secret. So it was not a cheat, it was a choice. Besides,” he adds, “if we’d done it in animation, we’d still be animating the picture today!” Even so, making the film was, he says, “a logistical nightmare. I recorded the voices in England, then I filmed the live action scenes — seventy-five to 200 set-ups a day, to get it done in time — using mostly different actors, fully costumed, playing back the pre-recorded dialogue to them so that the movement and timings would match the recordings. Only then did I go back to my desk to begin animating this two-and-a-half-hour picture! It was the hardest, most devastating and nerve-wracking two and a half years of my life.”

The worst was yet to come. When the film ended halfway through the second book, The Two Towers, audiences and critics cried foul. Bakshi says he always intended to make a second film, but by the time the first film was released, the film’s backers had reneged on their agreement to produce a follow-up. “They screwed me royally, because they never put ‘Part One’ on the screen,” he says of United Artists, who had declined to produce the film but wound up distributing it. “They were supposed to make two films, but they chickened out.” Although two animated television specials were produced in the late 1970s, based on The Hobbit and The Return of the King, neither was related to Bakshi’s version. Bakshi took solace in the fact that the film was a favourite of the Tolkien family, and has subsequently enjoyed a critical reappraisal. “I got a letter from Tolkien’s daughter saying she loved the movie, but I was pretty despondent for years, until I started to go online [at www.ralphbakshi.com], and got thousands of emails from people around the world saying they loved the movie. I feel much absolved.” Nevertheless, Bakshi was upset that no one involved in Peter Jackson’s adaptation contacted him during the production of those films: “I sat with the book with no illustrations, so every decision about what a goblin or hobbit or wraith has to look like was coming out of my own imagination and my experience of reading Tolkien, and my fear of making a mistake with the Tolkien fans. And he doesn’t even call me and thank me. Not that I’m bitter — I just find it ungentlemanly.”

It was during 1996 that the first rumours began to circulate concerning a proposed adaptation by Peter Jackson, whose diverse output as a director ranged from the splatterfests Bad Taste and Braindead, to horror comedy The Frighteners and the award-winning drama Heavenly Creatures. It was not until 1998, however, that Miramax Films came forward to negotiate with producer Saul Zaentz (who still retained the movie rights to the saga) and underwrite a two-movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings with Jackson as writer, producer and director. When Miramax got cold feet about a production of this scale, New Line Cinema stepped in, agreeing to back not two but three films — a risky prospect which has since paid off handsomely. “That was the key to it,” Jackson said later. “Without someone committing to the three movie idea, I think it would always have remained unfilmed.”

The same might be said of Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, the two-part film adaptation of which — subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again — was made possible by the success of The Lord of the Rings. “It’s a huge uphill struggle to make [films like] that,” John Boorman admits, “and as someone who’s tried to do it, I have the greatest admiration and sympathy for Peter Jackson. It’s glorious in that you know that’s what movies should be about — taking these huge risks and making something as wild and unfilmable and impossible as The Lord of the Rings.”

WE CAN REWRITE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE

Why the long development of Total Recall and its unproduced sequel is a memory most of those involved would rather forget

“Ron Shusett said, ‘You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version,’ like I had done something terrible. And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘No, no, we want Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mars.’”

— original Total Recall director David Cronenberg

In 1990, Austrian action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dutch director Paul Verhoeven teamed up for what would become one of the biggest science fiction films of all time, Total Recall. Schwarzenegger, the star of such films as Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando, Predator and The Running Man, played Douglas Quaid, a man whose dreams of Mars come to life when he takes a virtual holiday, only to be embroiled in a desperate race to save the red planet — a scenario which may or may not be a product of his imagination.

Despite its restrictive rating, the film grossed $250 million worldwide, enough to make it the highest grossing film of the year. Yet Total Recall had an inauspicious beginning. The film was loosely based on a 1966 short story entitled ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, written by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had previously inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which despite being a critical and commercial failure, had revived interest in Dick’s writing, and led to a number of his other stories being optioned for the cinema. ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, however, had been snapped up almost a decade earlier by future Alien co-writer and executive producer Ronald D. Shusett, who, at the time, had only a low-budget suspense film W (aka I Want Her Dead) to his credit. “I think it was probably 1974 that I optioned this story,” Shusett later recalled. “Phil Dick was then not a known author at all. He was still a struggling pulp writer, [as he was for] most of his career until Blade Runner got made.”

Shusett first encountered the twenty-three-page short story in the pages of the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the story, downtrodden clerk Douglas Quail visits a company named Rekall, Inc., which offers ‘false memory vacations’ which, as far as the brain is concerned, are as memorable as the real thing. As Quail is implanted with the fake memory of a secret agent’s trip to Mars, the process uncovers his true identity — not only a secret agent recently returned from Mars, but someone whose death will lead to the invasion of Earth, thanks to a deal he struck with aliens as a child. Said Shusett, “This was the first story which knocked me right out, which I knew would make an incredible movie, [albeit] an incredibly expensive one.”

Shusett paid $1,000 for the rights to the story, and invited a screenwriter friend, Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star), to help him turn it into a script. “Ronny Shusett walked into my apartment sporting a filthy old Xerox copy of Dick’s [story],” O’Bannon told Cinefantastique. “He said, ‘Dan, I was wondering if you’d take a look at this story and tell me if you think this would make a good movie.’ I said, ‘I know that story and I think it would make a terrific movie.’” Thirty pages into the script, now retitled Total Recall at Shusett’s suggestion, O’Bannon realised he had exhausted the story. “Dick’s story is short,” he said. “It ends very abruptly. You cannot take that particular story and simply inflate it up to a full-length piece.” O’Bannon realised that the story was effectively a first act, and that the second and third acts would have to be invented from scratch. “Shusett liked what I did and asked, ‘Where does it go from here?’ And I said, ‘We take him to Mars.’”

The resulting script opens with the protagonist, Quail (the name was eventually altered to Quaid to avoid references to the then-Vice President, Dan Quayle), dreaming of a Martian pyramid of which he has no conscious memory. “Quaid, Earth’s top secret agent, went to Mars and entered this [alien] compound. The machine killed him and created a synthetic duplicate. He is that synthetic duplicate,” O’Bannon explained, “[and] he cannot be killed because he can anticipate danger before it happens.” The fact that this duplicate is invulnerable leads the government of Earth to a radical solution: “Earth wants to kill him but cannot. That’s why they go to all this trouble to erase his brain to make him think he’s nobody. It’s the only way they can control him.” At the climax of the script, Quaid puts his hand on the Martian machine, at which point he achieves ‘total recall’, discovering his true identity: a Martian machine. “He is, in effect, the resurrection of the Martian race in a synthetic body. He turns and says to all the other characters, ‘It’s going to be fun to play God.’” O’Bannon’s co-writer, however, wanted a more dramatic and externalized climax. “Shusett and I never saw eye to eye on the end of the movie,” O’Bannon admitted, adding: “The end that they filmed, in my estimation, is lame.”

O’Bannon and Shusett enjoyed a more fruitful collaboration on Alien (1979), the success of which gave Shusett a development deal at Disney, where he set to work on Total Recall once again. When Disney eventually passed on the project, Dino De Laurentiis’ company DEG stepped in, with plans for Richard Rush, director of The Stunt Man, or Lewis Teague (Cujo) to direct. Yet the difficulties with the script’s third act remained; problems that De Laurentiis hoped his next choice would solve: Canadian horror director David Cronenberg, fresh from the mainstream success of The Dead Zone (1983). “At that time I was not a Philip Dick fan,” Cronenberg admitted to Serge Grünberg. “I knew about him but I had stopped reading sci-fi when I was a kid; probably sometime in the 1950s. That was when I started reading guys like Burroughs and Nabokov. So I missed the beginning of Philip K. Dick’s reign as one of the supremos of sci-fi. It was the script of Total Recall which Dino gave to me which got me interested. It had this very wonderful beginning which was pure Philip K. Dick — and then they didn’t know what to do with it. So I was intrigued because it felt very close, it felt good.”

Cronenberg recalls spending a year writing and rewriting his own version of the script on a Xerox 860 word processor. “It’s a good thing I had a computer because I did about twelve drafts in about twelve months,” he says. “I was constantly fighting with Ron Shusett, and meeting with him, and then at a certain point I was sitting in a room full of people, and Ron said, ‘You know what you’ve done? You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version,’ like I had done something terrible. And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘No, no, we want Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mar.’ So I said, ‘Well, Jeez, I wish we’d all had this discussion twelve months ago — it wouldn’t have wasted all our time!’” Says Shusett, “I didn’t want to do it as serious as Blade Runner. I thought it needed to have a Raiders tone; not quite so humorous, but certainly closer to that than Cronenberg’s approach.” Cronenberg confirms that De Laurentiis shared Shusett’s view. “I said, ‘Dino, I think we have to stop because we’re obviously talking about two different movies, and we might as well acknowledge it now. I don’t want to make your movie. It seems that you don’t want to make my movie. We should stop.’ He was rational but he was telling me he was going to sue me. I was surprised he even cared, but it was like he had done a deal with me and... so I basically said that I would make another movie with him. I mean I obviously wanted to work with him, but that project was clearly not the right one.”

“Cronenberg quit for a number of reasons,” Shusett explained, adding that the problems began around the time Richard Dreyfuss became interested in the role of Quaid. The actor was already an Oscar winner and star of two Steven Spielberg blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and wanted the writers to mould the character of Quaid to his ‘everyman’ persona, rather than the action hero described in the O’Bannon-Shusett version. “First of all, he and I were having a number of creative disagreements, which started about the time of Richard Dreyfuss’ involvement. [Then] Cronenberg started to feel that the movie should take on a whole new approach, different than either of the previous ones. I disagreed with him. I wanted to go either with our earlier approach... [or] the one Dreyfuss, Cronenberg and I had evolved. But suddenly David was against his own ideas.”

So how would Cronenberg’s Total Recall have looked? “First of all, I really wanted to cast William Hurt,” he says, “and the difference between Bill Hurt and Arnold Schwarzenegger probably tells you everything. I was doing something that I thought was faithful to Phil Dick and also to my own sense of the complex understanding of what memory is and what identity is. Obviously it would have been sci-fi and you would have gone to Mars, but it would have been like Spider Goes to Mars,” he adds, referring to his 2002 film starring Ralph Fiennes as a man struggling to piece his memories together, “as opposed to Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mars. In a way, Spider really is an examination of memory and how it is a created thing, not sort of a video documentary of your past but something that you’re constantly upgrading, altering, changing, shifting and editing, to the extent that your memories are your identity and you’re also messing around with your identity, which certainly was something that I’d really gone into in great depth in Total Recall.”

In 1991, Cinefantastique writer Bill Florence summarised one of Cronenberg’s drafts, noting that his version diverged most significantly following Quaid’s arrival on Mars. “Quaid takes a cab driven by Benny... to the cab depot, where he finds Melina, the chief cabbie. She gives him a job as a cab driver, and he quickly avails himself of his own transportation to visit Quato [Kuato in the final film], a memory manipulator [who] has a malformed head growing out of his body... called ‘The Oracle’.” (Given Cronenberg’s fondness for physical mutation in his films, it is perhaps unnecessary to say that the idea of mutants on Mars, and of Kuato’s malformed congenital twin, were originally Cronenberg’s inventions.) When The Oracle dies while attempting to bring Quaid’s secret past to light, Quaid visits Pintaldi, a face changer, whose manipulations of Quaid’s facial structure reveal him to be Chairman Mandrell, dictator of Earth. After a failed assassination attempt, Quaid/Mandrell confronts Mars Administrator Cohaagen, who convinces him to infiltrate Mars Fed, who suppressed his true identity, and gives him a signal generator to track his location. “When the generator explodes — meant to kill Mandrell, but killing Benny the cab driver instead — Mandrell returns to the cab depot,” Florence continued, “where an EIA doctor tries to convince him he’s dreaming, a scene almost exactly like the final film’s Dr Edgemar sequence... In the climax of Cronenberg’s script, Mandrel and Cohaagen find themselves alone on a robot-controlled tour bus, moving over the Martian desert. Cohaagen reveals that Mandrell never really existed, that Quaid is just a minor government functionary selected to fill the role of chairman. Cohaagen planned to take over, using Quaid’s Mandrell image.” A fight ensues, Quaid/Mandrell defeats Cohaagen, and assumes his place as Chairman Mandrell, with Melina at his side.

According to Ron Miller (Dune), engaged as production illustrator by DEG during the period of Cronenberg’s involvement, it was more than just the story that might have been different: Miller recalls Martian creatures called ‘Ganzibulls’, originally created by Shusett, but retained in Cronenberg’s drafts. “They were creatures that lived in the sewers of the Mars city, called Venusville,” he told Cinefantastique. “In Cronenberg’s version, they were mutant camels. In Ron’s original script, the Martian colonists used camels as pack animals, and the camels wore oxygen masks... Cronenberg elaborated on the camels idea by having the monsters in the sewers be mutant camels.” Miller also remembers working with art director Pier Luigi Basile (Conan the Destroyer) at DEG’s studios in Rome, where “nothing much happened. We just drew all day for weeks on end. Cronenberg finally was hired, and he gave us more direction, more purpose. Bob Ringwood was going to do the costume design for the Cronenberg version, so he was there, on and off, for a couple of weeks and did a few sketches.”

Cronenberg recalls that, several years down the line, De Laurentiis offered him the project again, his way. He declined. “It’s dead for me now,” he told the producer. “I can’t get back into that now. I just can’t go back to working with Ron and fighting the same old battles and doing all that stuff.” Cronenberg was mostly unimpressed by the finished film. “I thought it was a bad movie,” he told Serge Grünberg, “although there were one or two moments that were true Philip Dick moments in it — they were good. But they weren’t good because it was Schwarzenegger still: first of all as an actor for that kind of role, and secondly as that character. The whole point of that character was that he was a unique, shy, mild character. They tried to compensate by making him a construction worker, but they gave him this beautiful Sharon Stone wife.” This, of course, was a deliberate move on the part of director Paul Verhoeven (who would soon make Stone a star in Basic Instinct), who understood that Quaid’s low-grade employment was as far as possible from secret agent, while his beautiful wife was designed to keep him satisfied with his otherwise average lifestyle. As Verhoeven explains, “With Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main part, [an audience] would not want him to dream. So to a large degree by choosing Arnold, there was a preference in reality.” Nevertheless, Cronenberg had other reservations: “I thought it was very visually tacky and messy,” he said. “Verhoeven didn’t do a good job with all the effects and the mutants and all of that stuff. They went for the action stuff purely and that was it: it was an action gimmick. So I didn’t really like the movie and I didn’t think much of it. But by the time I saw it, I didn’t care. I was over it.”

Although Cronenberg was the first director involved with Total Recall, his would certainly not be the last name to be stencilled on the director’s chair before Paul Verhoeven’s was allowed to dry. “As I recall it was seven directors,” says Shusett, “most prominently Richard Rush, who’d directed The Stunt Man. He and Dino couldn’t agree, because Richard liked our third act of Total Recall — Mars gets air — and Dino didn’t. Richard Rush said, ‘It’s wonderful, Dino. It’ll work perfectly.’ And Dino said, ‘Rick, I can’t go with you as director. I don’t even want to go to Mars.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can’t take that out, it’s in my contract.’ Dino said, ‘It’ll never get made,’ and I said, ‘Fine, I’d rather never make it.’ I said, ‘Mars is in it, and Mars gets air, it’s the first ending that’s worked, Dino. Show it to another director.’ So one day I get a call from Dino, he says, ‘Ron, I love you so much I could kiss you on the mouth! You saved me! You’re so goddamned stubborn, you saved me! I showed this script to Bruce Beresford... [and] I say, ‘Take out Mars, take out air.’ He says, ‘Dino, you full of shit!’”

Beresford, a two-time Academy Award nominee best known for the acclaimed dramas Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, soon found himself in his native Australia, with Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze in the lead of what Shusett has described as a less gritty, more fun, ‘Spielbergian’ version of Total Recall. The next thing Shusett knew, however, “Beresford called us and said, ‘The movie’s off! Dino’s gone bankrupt! He’s fired eighty people and they’re tearing down the sets as I look out the window.’”

It was at this point, around 1987, that Shusett’s co-screenwriter Gary Goldman first encountered the project. “I was asked to do a polish,” says Goldman, who read the script, and liked it, but turned down the job because he had just started working with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — fresh from his first Hollywood success, the sci-fi satire RoboCop — on his own project, coincidentally an out-of-body action film that Goldman co-wrote and was producing, entitled Warrior. “This was set up at Warner Brothers, and I wanted to work with Paul, whose work I had long admired, and who had just come off RoboCop, which I loved.” Although the pair worked together for several months, they were unable to reach a point where Verhoeven was ready to direct Warrior. In the meantime, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been circling Total Recall since Swayze’s departure, learned that his Conan collaborator Dino De Laurentiis was in financial difficulties in Australia, and that the production had all but collapsed. Schwarzenegger called De Laurentiis and asked if his company would sell the rights to Dick’s story. When De Laurentiis agreed, Schwarzenegger called Carolco co-owners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, for whom the actor had made Red Heat, and suggested that they buy it. The asking price: $3 million. Says Schwarzenegger, “Within a few hours, they owned the movie.” Next, Schwarzenegger claims to have cornered Dutch director Paul Verhoeven at lunch, and insisted he take a look at Total Recall.

Incredibly, Verhoeven was the director Ron Shusett had originally had in mind when he was trying to set the film up at Disney: “In 1981, eight years before I got the movie financed, I wanted Paul to direct it,” he reveals. “I’d just seen Soldier of Orange, and I said, ‘That’s the guy I want.’ His agent said she gave him the script, but that he doesn’t like science fiction. Then, about seven years later, he fell in love with science fiction and made RoboCop.” When Verhoeven did eventually read the script, Shusett recalls, “he didn’t even have to finish reading it before he had committed to it. He said he’d got as far as the scene in the hotel where Edgemar says, ‘You’re not really here, you’re asleep in the chair at Rekall,’ closed the script, called his agent, called Schwarzenegger, and said, ‘I’m in!’” Adds Goldman, “I told Paul the ironic story that I had turned down the chance to re-write Total Recall in order to work with him. He asked my opinion of the screenplay. I told him. He said that we saw it the same way, and that he would try to get me the job to rewrite it. And he did.”

By this time, there had been dozens of drafts — Verhoeven remembers “about thirty” — variously credited to Shusett and O’Bannon, Shusett and Star Trek: The Motion Picture screenwriter Jon Povill, and Shusett and Steven Pressfield (Freejack). Goldman says that Verhoeven read them all, and sent him the ones he wanted Goldman to read. “The story of the first half was almost exactly as it is in the movie,” he explains, “but there was general agreement that the second half of the movie wasn’t working — that is, everything after the Dr Edgemar scene. I had to adjust everything in order to make the second half work adequately. I also had to reconfigure the movie to fit Arnold, [because] in the short story and in all previous drafts, Quaid was a mild-mannered guy who suddenly discovered that he was a high-powered secret agent.”

According to Goldman, several fundamental decisions determined most of the changes. Firstly, Verhoeven wanted to make the movie as if Dr Edgemar might be telling the truth in the hotel room, so that from the point that Quaid undergoes the procedure at Rekall, everything you see is Quaid’s fantasy. “Everything we have seen before, in the last forty-five minutes, is all fantasy,” Verhoeven explains. “It’s a dream. Which is disturbing to the audience because they don’t want that, of course. They want an adventure story, they don’t want a fake adventure story. So they are on Arnold’s side trying to believe that it’s all true, while [Dr Edgemar] is trying to tell him that it’s not true.” As Edgemar asks rhetorically, “What’s bullshit? That you’re having a paranoid episode triggered by acute neurochemical trauma? Or that you’re really an invincible secret agent from Mars who’s the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he’s a lowly construction worker?” Quaid, of course, shoots Edgemar, thereby choosing to continue the fantasy — if, indeed, it is a fantasy.

Thus, Goldman had to reconfigure the story so that it could work both ways: as if it were really happening; and as if it were all in Quaid’s mind. “That’s the great thing about the movie,” says Schwarzenegger, “that from the beginning it always works on two levels and the audience has to guess what is reality and what is not.” Says Verhoeven, “As much as possible we kept these two realities alive, so that everything could be explained one way or another. And of course with Arnold being a superhero, people would always hope and think that it’s real, but there’s strong doubts about that if you look at the movie for a second time.” To illustrate this, Verhoeven points to the scene where Rekall salesman Bob McClane tells Quaid the nature of his chosen vacation: “You are a top operative under deep cover on your most important mission,” he tells his eager customer. “People are trying to kill you, left and right. You meet this beautiful, exotic woman... By the time the trip is over you get the girl, kill the bad guys and save the entire planet.” In other words, says Verhoeven, “McClane tells him everything that’s going to happen in the movie! It’s counter to every normal narrative — you would not tell anyone where it’s going. [But here] you get the whole story completely formulated for you. In the next scene,” he adds, “we are given several clues, [such as] the woman that he wants to be implanted in his dream — because he can make a choice; he can choose the woman. Of course the woman he describes is the woman he has a kind of fantasy image of that he dreams about, which is this girl, Melina. He describes her as well as he can, and he gets her!”

Having solved this problem with the kind of narrative acrobatics of which Philip K. Dick might have been proud, Goldman tackled another problem. “At the point that Quaid gets his memory back, I thought there was nothing interesting left in the movie — suddenly it just became this ordinary action picture. I wanted the whole movie to be as interesting as the beginning. So I invented the idea that Quaid wants to get back to being his authentic self, but he finds out that his authentic self [Hauser — the agent working for Cohaagen] is evil.” In other words, Quaid is not merely Hauser without some key memories, but a separate individual. “At the end of the movie, you find out that Hauser’s in on it,” says Shusett, “that he helped erase his own brain so that Quaid would not recognise his intent to assassinate [the rebel leader] Kuato. And then Hauser says, ‘Well, I hate to ask you, but it’s my body — I was there first, and I want it back. Maybe we’ll see each other in our dreams.’” Says Goldman, “This was a very fresh idea at the time. To my knowledge, it was without precedent.” In the new version, Quaid must decide if he wants to be technically authentic, but evil, or be true to his artificial self, and good. “He has to make a very interesting moral choice, and this takes him straight into Phil Dick territory,” Goldman explains. “Quaid is an artificial human, like the replicants in Blade Runner, except that it’s not his body that is artificial, but only his mental programming. The artificial person, Quaid, is more human than the authentic human, Hauser.

“It’s also psychologically accurate, I think, to say that no one (except in a Hollywood movie) would give up his/her identity, just to become authentic. Identity is life itself. It’s an interesting idea to be offered a choice to have a better life, but not to be oneself.” The hard part, says Goldman, was making this work; even Verhoeven was not convinced it could be done, until Goldman came up with the idea for the second video message from Hauser, which he receives after Quaid is captured by Cohaagen in Kuato’s lair. “That part of the narrative, that little twist, was something that Gary Goldman added to the story, because that was never there before,” Verhoeven admits. “Now Quaid will be forced to become the person he doesn’t want to be, because he has to make a moral choice. The last thing that he wants is to go back to being Hauser.”

“Paul Verhoeven had great instincts, great ideas, and intellectual courage,” says Goldman. “I am sure that all of my good ideas would have been rejected by any studio and almost any other director. In Hollywood, ideas are anathema, and the bigger the budget, the more forbidden they are. The authorities are not very educated, but they can smell an idea at a hundred paces — and, like a giant in a fairy tale, they will sniff out the idea and rip it out. Only a powerful director can protect an idea. And Carolco was the perfect place to work, because Mario and Andy gave their directors almost complete freedom.”

Goldman says that he and Verhoeven were “generally interested in having as much fun with ‘mindfucks’ as we could. This included introducing as many big surprises as possible. For example, the idea that the whole plot was about using Quaid to lead them to Kuato, because Kuato was psychic and would detect any traitor. Plus we knew that, at that time in Hollywood, for reasons of political correctness, African-American characters had been typecast as good guys. So I decided to make Benny the bad guy, as it would catch audiences by surprise. Paul wasn’t afraid of being politically incorrect — in fact, you could say that his whole career is based on being politically incorrect. He does it with a vengeance. I would say that I have the same bent, but don’t take the same relish in it. But we’re both interested in seeing things clearly, and seeing through popular clichès and delusions and hypocrisies. It was this same disposition that made us really embrace Phil Dick’s challenge to consensual reality, and to push it as far as we did. And to leave the movie on a note of doubt, but with a sense of humour.”

Ironically, Goldman was not a fan of Dick’s work at the time, having had very little exposure to it. Nevertheless, he says, “I am generally faithful to all the writers who come before me, from source material to earlier screenwriters. I try not to get involved in rewriting projects unless I like what’s already there. And then my modus operandi is to bring out the existing values, and try to complete and perfect them. So, I was being faithful to the ideas in the first half of the screenplay, which were the same as the ideas in the first half of the short story. Phil himself tended to combine and garble his many ideas, and he rarely worked out any idea in a complete and consistent way. He just kept flitting about to the next idea.” Shusett agrees: “His work is very tough to translate into a screenplay because it has such brilliant set-ups that it’s hard to match his level of brilliance in the pay-off. That’s why most of his best work is short stories, and even those stories don’t have a third act.”

Goldman admits that the second half of the movie, beginning as Quaid arrives on Mars, was largely a concession to Hollywood plotting, and therefore retained most of the structure of the version Bruce Beresford had planned to shoot. “I didn’t think I had the liberty to make big changes because I was under the impression that Arnold, the studio and Paul were all ready to make that story. So I mainly concentrated on fixing and improving what was there. I would have preferred a more consistently realistic view of the future and more believable science, in regard to gravity, physics, and atmosphere. But we were making an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and that guided the tone and many of the decisions. Even so, we tried to make the movie a bit less jokey and more rigorous than Arnold’s previous movies.”

Having completed his first rewrite, Goldman and Verhoeven met with Schwarzenegger, Shusett, Vajna and Kassar. “Arnold and Ron had discussed our draft, and they felt that our climax lacked emotion,” Goldman remembers. “This was a valid observation because Paul prefers a dry emotional tone, and he really didn’t take very seriously the subplot about Martian liberation. He saw the movie as an intellectual puzzle. But faced with opposition from the star, I saw the need for a compromise, and fortunately an idea came to me in the meeting, and I proposed the idea about Cohaagen shutting off the air. This gave us a nice cruel action to justify the suffering of the poor mutants. I made these changes, and we went into production.” Adds Shusett, “All of a sudden all the pieces came together, and instead of going to Australia we went to Mexico.”

“I think we were a very writer-friendly group,” says Verhoeven, “because they were part of everything. They could see the dailies and have as much input as they wanted.” Adds Goldman, “It was a rare privilege for a Hollywood screenwriter, who is usually unwelcome on the set. If a screenwriter is present, it is usually an emergency script doctor who is brought in to ‘fix’ a problem. But Paul has great respect for screenplays and screenwriters. He works tirelessly on his scripts, and then he shoots them word for word. He almost never improvises, and he prevents the actors from deviating from the text. If something wasn’t working on the set, he would call for me and ask me to write something new. Ron Shusett and I liked and respected each other, and we worked together on the rewrites while we were down there. We spent a lot of time making small revisions, but ultimately I would say that we changed less than one per cent.”

Both writers admit to a few issues with the finished film. “There’s too much foul language, too much noisy shooting, too much violence and death,” says Goldman. “It’s a bit too long, and you don’t really care about the mutants. And the bulging eyes at the end went on too long,” he adds, referring to Quaid and Melina gasping for air in the Martian atmosphere. “I think that hurt us a lot because it was like a runner stumbling at the finish line. A lot of these things could have been fixed if we had had one test screening, but, alas, we didn’t. There was no time.” Shusett agrees: “Paul and Gary and I always regretted not having time for a preview, because you can’t get any perspective on what you’re doing.” Additional pressure came from the impending release of Warren Beatty’s star-studded Dick Tracy, which the filmmakers, and the studio, saw as a threat. “We didn’t want to open the same week, so we paid editors ‘golden time’ so we could go out a week earlier than Dick Tracy,” says Shusett, “but that robbed us of any preview. If we had just had a week to calm down, look at what we’d just cut... I wouldn’t have shot anything differently, I just would have re-edited the third act a little tighter, and then I think it would have hit the jackpot instead of it being seventy-five or eighty per cent the movie I was hoping it would be. Having said that, we were lucky to get that close.”

“I think that we captured Phil’s serio-comic tone better than anyone else has.” Goldman says. “That’s really what sets his work apart, in my opinion — his irreverent, alienated, kitchen sink, neurotic view of the future. Also, Paul Verhoeven is a truly brilliant man with a Doctorate in mathematics. Although his movies can be crass, Paul is a truly independent and deep thinker. It’s important not to confuse style with substance. Paul likes to be crass and offensive, on top of being incisive and precise. Paul, like Phil defined himself, is a ‘crap artist’, making great art from shit. It’s a mistake to think that a good Phil Dick movie is necessarily dark, moody and elegant, like Blade Runner.” Above all, Goldman doubts that anyone but Verhoeven would have had the courage to make a movie which questions the supposed reality the audience has just experienced. “He made that decision, and I executed it,” he says. “I doubt that anyone but myself would have thought up the idea that Quaid doesn’t recover his memory and become authentic again; [that] he is not the same as Hauser — Hauser is bad — and Quaid must choose his artificial identity over his real one. I think these are powerful extensions of Phil’s setup and themes.” Overall, he adds, “I loved working with Paul, Ron, Mario and Andy, Arnold, and Sharon Stone. It was a perfect experience from beginning to end, and I don’t expect to be so lucky again.” Certainly, Goldman would not be so fortunate with his subsequent association with Total Recall 2.

Today, the box office performance of Total Recall would virtually guarantee a sequel. In 1990, however, Hollywood was a very different place, as Goldman explains: “When we finished Total Recall, none of the major players wanted to make a sequel. They all felt that the franchise wasn’t well suited to a sequel. They also held the previously accepted idea that sequels were commercial debasements that serious artists did not indulge in.” The success of James Cameron’s Aliens had been an exception, and the same director’s subsequent sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day would further change this way of thinking. At the time, however, Shusett’s and Goldman’s interest in a sequel to Total Recall fell on deaf ears.

Then, in the early 1990s, Goldman optioned another Philip K. Dick story, ‘Minority Report’, with a view to directing it himself as a low-budget feature. He approached Verhoeven to ask if he would attach himself as executive producer, thus throwing the weight of his name behind the project, even if he was not directly involved. “He read the short story, liked it, and agreed to help me out. Then he asked me if I had thought about how well the story worked as a Total Recall sequel. Although it had nothing to do with the themes of the movie, there was something about the tone and driving narrative that made it seem perfect for a sequel.” Better still, it did not repeat anything from the original film, allowing Goldman to take the franchise in a totally new direction, but one that would be thematically consistent with the original. “This is what appealed to Paul,” he says. “The possibility of doing a sequel that seemed original, not repetitive or derivative.”

In Dick’s story, certain human beings are born with telepathic powers, shunned by ordinary citizens but embraced by the government as the foundation for a new anti-crime organisation called the Pre-Crime division, which uses the telepaths (known as ‘pre-cogs’) to predict illegal activities before they occur, and arrest the would-be criminals before any crime is committed. The plot revolves around a particular Pre-Crime detective forced to go on the run when the pre-cogs spit out his name as a future murderer. As Verhoeven explains, “There was an introduction [in Total Recall] that the mutants were perhaps clairvoyant, and that was used in the idea for the second one where Quaid becomes the head of this company that can look into the future and protect citizens by eliminating criminals before they do the crime.” Thus, the mutants would become the ‘pre-cogs’ of Dick’s story, the film rights to which Goldman now owned.

“I had to make a tough decision between continuing with my plan to direct a small movie from ‘Minority Report’, or to become the writer-producer of a Total Recall sequel based on ‘Minority Report’,” Goldman says. “At the time, I was still working closely with Paul and Carolco. We had worked together on Basic Instinct, which had turned out to be the biggest movie of the year worldwide, and I had done a rewrite on Crusade which had gotten the project out of Development Hell and into pre-production [see chapter 6]. It seemed like the Total Recall sequel was a sure thing to speed into production, and become another big hit. So I decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.” At this point, Goldman and Verhoeven discovered that Ron Shusett had a contractual right to write the first draft of any Total Recall sequel, and that they would therefore need his permission to proceed. Goldman proposed that they write the sequel together, based on the ‘Minority Report’ story, on the proviso that Goldman would then be attached to co-write all future Total Recall sequels. Says Shusett, “We worked on it together and immediately clicked, and it became a wonderful sequel. Arnold was going to star in it, and Paul Verhoeven was going to direct it. Then, right after we wrote it, Carolco went bankrupt.” Indeed, Carolco’s financial situation was so serious it reneged on its contractual payments to Shusett and Goldman. As a result, ownership of the underlying rights — to both the short story and the first draft — reverted to the writers, allowing them to move it to 20th Century Fox.

By this time, Verhoeven was busy shooting Showgirls, and Goldman says he lost interest in the sequel. Not so, says Verhoeven: “Somebody whose name I won’t name, without warning, took it away — somebody who had me on their pay list, like a Judas. So in some subversive ways, I think, it left Carolco and it came into the hands of Jan De Bont.” At this stage, Verhoeven’s fellow Dutchman was a celebrated cinematographer, yet to direct the runaway hit Speed. Says Goldman, “Jan and the studio discussed acquiring the Total Recall franchise from Carolco, and continuing to develop ‘Minority Report’ as a Total Recall sequel. Ultimately, they decided not to continue with it as a sequel, so we removed all the Total Recall elements and used the first draft as the foundation for further work.” From that point on, ‘Minority Report’ was developed as a free-standing movie, based only on the Dick short story. Says Shusett, “We were really devastated, because we had proved tangibly to everybody, including Paul and Arnold, that it would make a great sequel. But my spirits rose when Fox bought it as a non-sequel, a free-standing movie.”

Even after its estrangement from Total Recall 2 and development as a separate entity, Minority Report suffered a further five years in Development Hell, with Jan De Bont eventually jumping ship, as Shusett recalls: “He was very hot from Speed and he’d followed up with Twister, but then Speed 2 and The Haunting bombed out, and gradually Fox lost faith in him. We wrote a new draft for him in ’95, but they couldn’t find an actor that liked his draft that Fox was in favour of too. It was years later — ’98 or ’99 — that Spielberg came in and read a draft he didn’t like. But when we personally got our draft to him, and persuaded him to read it, he did like it. And then he used an amalgamation of some of their draft and some of our draft and his own ideas, and because he’s Steven Spielberg, his version was better in many ways, and he made the best film of all.” Shusett — who, like Goldman, earned an executive producer credit on Spielberg’s film (Jan De Bont gets an associate producer credit) — admits to being surprised that the director’s take on the material was so dark, “even darker than our last draft. It was so dark that I think summer audiences weren’t ready for it. We should have released it in the winter, and then I think they might have expected it, and been able to handle it. It was too dark a movie for people expecting summer fun with a Total Recall/Phil Dick name on it, and our names connected to it — they thought it would be like Total Recall. And instead it was more like Blade Runner and they weren’t ready for that.” Indeed, although Minority Report (2002) grossed $350 million worldwide, it fell far short of expectations generated by the first teaming of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, especially on a sci-fi project. “It got wonderful reviews, and everybody thought it would do $500 or $600 million worldwide,” Shusett points out, “but it only made $350 million — and only $130 million in America, when there are movies making $200, $300 million domestically.”

In the meantime, Carolco had sold the Total Recall TV rights to DFL Entertainment for $1.2 million, resulting in the short-lived Showtime series Total Recall 2070. The sale led Shusett and Goldman to believe that the possibility of a Total Recall sequel was dead forever, since studios rarely buy into a script or film, much less a franchise, unless all rights are available in all media. Nevertheless, at a subsequent bankruptcy hearing for now-defunct Carolco on 14 January 1997, Dimension Films, the recently-formed genre division of Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, paid $3.15 million for the theatrical sequel, prequel and remake rights to Total Recall. “I heard later that they were surprised that the TV rights had already been sold off,” says Goldman. “They thought that was part of the package of rights that they acquired.” (Indeed, pressure from Dimension may have been behind DFL’s decision to ditch its original concept for the TV series — a direct continuation of the movie, featuring Quaid on Mars — for an Earth-based format using new characters, which ironically owed more to Blade Runner than Total Recall.) In what Carolco bankruptcy counsel Howard Weg described as “lively bidding”, Dimension had outbid DFL Entertainment, 20th Century Fox (which retired from the bidding when it reached $500,000) and Live Entertainment, whose final bid of $3.14 million was narrowly exceeded by Dimension, which had recently produced its first bona fide hit, Scream. “This is the perfect franchise opportunity for Dimension,” said co-founder Bob Weinstein, “[and] franchises are what Dimension is all about.”

Weinstein went on to say that he intended to contact the film’s original cast, but not its director Paul Verhoeven, whose most recent film was the costly flop Showgirls. “We’re going to our Miramax stable of directors,” he stated. “We have discussed story ideas, we have a concept, and we’re going forward with this film within the next year.” Weinstein dismissed suggestions that a sequel to the $80 million Total Recall would be expensive by definition, noting that significant profit participation on Scream made the $14 million-budget hit possible, and that the same financial structure — forgoing an upfront fee in return for a share of the back end profits — would make Total Recall 2 viable. Nevertheless, purchasing the rights, particularly for such a colossal sum, was a curious move for Dimension, since under the terms of a deal with corporate parent Walt Disney Co., the average budget of its films must be $12.5 million. Thus, if one film’s budget exceeds this sum, another must fall under it by the same amount. As a result, Dimension would need to generate a screenplay as cheaply as possible, and executives were delighted when a writer already under contract to Miramax offered his services.

Matt Cirulnick had just turned twenty-two when he signed a three-picture deal with Miramax, the first of which was the urban drug drama Paid in Full, eventually released in October 2002. “Immediately after turning in that script, Miramax informed my agents that they wanted to activate the second picture in my deal,” the writer recalls. “My agent gave me an open writing assignment list, and — lo and behold — on the list I see Total Recall 2. So I flip out. I remember to this day the font, I remember the way it looked, because when I saw those words I was like, ‘I’m getting this job.’ I was born in ’76, so I was watching Total Recall on tape when it came out and it was one of my favourite films. But my agents laughed at me and said, ‘Young buck, you’re just starting out, they’ve had some big guys on this job,’ blah blah blah, and that fired me up, because I thought, ‘I can’t control how old I am or my credits, all I can control is the quality of the words on the page. I can’t control whether or not a movie gets made.’ So I said, ‘Look, I’ll put my writing up against whoever’s writing, and let’s see what happens. I gotta take a shot.’”

At the time, Dimension executives were set to close a deal with Bob Gale, who co-wrote the Back to the Future films with Robert Zemeckis. “I can’t say for certain what the reasons were for my agents not going after the job aggressively,” says Cirulnick, “but the bottom line is that what I was getting for the entire script would have been the commission my agents would get on Bob Gale!” When Dimension failed to make a deal with Gale, Cirulnick did not wait to be asked. “Luckily for me, one of the executives on Paid in Full, Jesse Berdinka, was also one of the executives on Total Recall 2, so I had my agent hit Dimension, and I hit Dimension personally, and I locked myself in a room and came up with an idea for Total Recall 2. I pitched the junior executive, then I pitched the president [Cary Granat], then I met with Bob Weinstein, Andrew Rona, Cary Granat and Jesse Berdinka, and gave them my pitch — and Bob was like, ‘Okay, you got it. Go.’”

There was just one problem: unbeknownst to Dimension, Ron Shusett’s contract for Total Recall meant that they were obliged to hire him to write the first draft of any sequel. Shusett, in turn, was obliged to bring Goldman aboard, due to the agreement the pair had made during the ‘Minority Report’ affair. Having learned of these obligations, Dimension could simply have asked Shusett and Goldman to turn Cirulnick’s concept into a script; instead, they invited the pair to pitch their own ideas. “They didn’t even give us Matt’s idea,” says Shusett. “They said, ‘We have some ideas, but what idea do you have?’ So we told them our take.” Dimension executives had their own ideas about where they wanted to take the sequel, ideas which did not gel with Cirulnick’s approach. “We had, almost eerily, the same approach to doing the sequel — a different one than Matt had in mind. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you to do it,’ and they did. They were very good to their word,” he adds. “They didn’t low-ball us.” Announcing the deal in May 1998, Variety further noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger had attended a four-hour development meeting with Weinstein and Granat, and was said to be “actively involved” in the development of the film.

“We stuck fairly closely to their set-up that launches the story, but from there we were free to go where we wanted,” Goldman explains. “They knew what they liked in the original movie: they wanted to keep it as a popcorn movie with lots of cool stuff, but they also liked the ‘is it real or is it Memorex?’ theme — the ‘mindfucks’.” Dimension’s hope, he says, was to keep the ambiguity alive as long as possible by alternating between the theories. “It was a high wire act,” he explains, “where we would confirm that it was real on Mars, then use a narrative device to make it seem like he was on Earth or still in the Rekall chair, and then use an even more clever device to put him back on Mars. Even though this was our favourite theme too, Ron and I actually had to restrain them from overdoing it. They were real students of the movie, and we were flattered, but they didn’t quite understand the simplicity and subtlety of how we achieved our effects in the first movie. We took direction from them, but resisted decisions that we felt were mistakes. Eventually, they came to trust us when we said you can easily overdo the complications — and we arrived at a workable balance.”

The Shusett-Goldman draft opens amid celebrations for Mars’ independence, with Quaid and Melina honoured by President Gloria Palomares for their part in the struggle. Just as Quaid is about to give a speech, however, a double stabs him and takes his place... He wakes to find himself next to Melina. Only three weeks have passed since the events of Total Recall, and he is still among the Martian rebels — independence for Mars is still a dream. They tell him of ‘Project Whisper’, a form of mind control being planned by President Saarinen’s government, and suggest delving into his mind to see if Hauser knows anything about it. Reluctantly agreeing to submit to the operation, he falls unconscious... only to wake up at Rekall Incorporated, his wife Lori and Bob, the Rekall salesman, at his bedside, and Dr Edgemar very much alive. They convince him that he has not left Rekall since he began his vacation, yet events on Mars appear to have transpired largely as they occurred in Quaid’s Rekall trip — Mars has air, Cohaagen is dead — a suspicious development which Dr Edgemar attributes to real-world news programmes filtering into Quaid’s virtual adventure. “So, Mr Quaid,” Edgemar tells him, “like all vacations, this one too comes to an end. And as usual, we feel a little sad returning to the daily grind.” Quaid returns home with Lori, only to be told that during the six months he was comatose at Rekall, she began a new relationship with her personal trainer. (“Harvey Weinstein had a [professional] relationship with Sharon Stone, and they wanted to try to get her back into the franchise,” Goldman explains.) Dejected and financially dependent on Rekall, Quaid finds a job on the construction site of a Seattle-based ‘space elevator’ — one of Arthur C. Clarke’s proposed constructs tethering an orbital space station to the Earth, allowing payloads to be transported cheaply to and from space.

Meanwhile, an imminent presidential election draws Quaid’s attention to an electoral campaign by Gloria Palomares, the President from his dream, denounced by her opponents as a “mutant lover” for promising to hold a referendum on Mars’ independence if she is elected. Torn between his feelings for Melina (whom he now believes to be a construct of Rekall) and Renee, one of Mrs Palomares’ campaign volunteers, Quaid becomes involved with her political campaign, but is betrayed and framed for an explosion which wrecks the space elevator. Imprisoned for six months in a space prison known as the Pasternak Institute for the Criminally Insane, he manages to escape, and rejoins what remains of the rebels, who tell him of Melina’s death.

Posing as Hauser, Quaid heads to Vladivostock, where he is shocked to meet up with his own mother, whom he thought long dead. Mrs Hauser, evidently a Saarinen sympathiser, sees through Quaid’s deception, but although she threatens him, she knows that if she kills Quaid, her beloved Hauser will die too. Through his mother, Quaid discovers that Project Whisper is a planet-wide programme designed to keep the electorate voting a certain way, thus keeping the next government — Saarinen’s — in power forever. After a gunfight with a dozen Lori clones and his own mother, Quaid succeeds in destroying Project Whisper, an act which creates a vacuum (allowing a popular scene from Total Recall to be reprised) and ultimately leads to the election of Mrs Palomares and independence for Mars. He is about to make a speech when he sees Dr Edgemar sitting in a front seat — but the next instant, he is gone. Did his eyes deceive him? Or is he still back at Rekall, dreaming of Martian independence?

“[Dimension] liked the screenplay,” Goldman says. “We did one fairly minor polish, and then they were ready to make the movie. They told Arnold that they were ready to make the movie. They let him know that they would pay him his price. Ron, Arnold, and I were all at the William Morris Agency. Five or six agents there read our script and loved it. I would say that there was a consensus that this should be Arnold’s next movie.” Schwarzenegger, however, didn’t agree. “He said it was too complicated. In general, Arnold never seemed to appreciate the complications in the original, or to grasp that the essence of the franchise was the complicated mindfucks.” Adds Shusett, “He had seen the outline, and gave [Dimension] the okay to pay us, but sometimes when you see things in script form, some things feel different than on a ten-page outline. He said, ‘No, I don’t like this, I don’t want to do it.’ Bob Weinstein said, ‘He just turned down the best script that’s ever been offered to him,’ which coming from Bob, who can be very tough, is a real compliment. He said, ‘I always considered the first Total Recall [to be] one of the five best science fiction movies ever, and now you’ve topped it with this one, he won’t do it.’ Dimension was very disappointed, and we were too. At that point,” he concludes, “it just went into limbo.”

In the meantime, rumours had been circulating that Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes, who had directed the $150 million-grossing hit Star Trek: First Contact and had already been hired to helm the next installment of that franchise, had been in talks about directing Total Recall 2. In March 1998, Frakes confirmed that, of the various projects being developed by his Geopp Circle production company, Total Recall 2 was the closest to realisation. “I’m very jazzed about that,” he told Ian Spelling. “If it all works out and Mr Schwarzenegger is available, we’ll get going with pre-production of it at the end of [Star Trek: Insurrection]. They wouldn’t have gone this far if Schwarzenegger weren’t interested,” he added. “[Dimension] bought it because he wants to play the character again. Wouldn’t it be cool if it all happens?” Speaking to the Calgary Sun later in the year, Frakes added: “Arnold is serious because I’ve already received a draft of a screenplay.” Although Frakes expressed concern that the budget of the script might prove too rich for the terms of Dimension’s deal with Disney, he added, “Apparently, Sharon Stone wants to return as well — and it’s possible because there is a lot of time travel in this draft of Total Recall 2.”

Goldman, however, recalls a different version of the story. “Jonathan Frakes was involved in the early stages,” he says. “Dimension had been in talks with him before we got involved. We had one meeting with Frakes, but we never heard any more about him. The reason was that Bob Weinstein started working with Arnold, and Arnold’s vision of the picture was different than Bob’s. To get Arnold, it was clear that the sequel couldn’t be medium budget, as envisioned by Bob... and that Arnold would not consent to work with anyone but an A-list director or rising star. So Frakes was tabled.” In August 1999, Frakes was quoted as saying that Total Recall 2 was still on Dimension’s list of movies, and that they were “waiting for Mr Schwarzenegger’s hands to free up. We’ve got a script from the writer of the original, and we’re giving some notes on it,” he added. “It’s a very big, wonderful, expensive script.” By February 2000, however, Frakes confirmed to Starburst that the project was dead — at least for the time being — blaming Schwarzenegger’s over-loaded schedule. “Total Recall is an old movie now and it looks like one,” he added. “I shouldn’t say this, obviously, because I’d love to do that film, but they blew smoke up my ass four years ago, and nothing’s happened since. I’m not holding my breath.”

Instead, Schwarzenegger chose to make The 6th Day, in which he played a commercial pilot who discovers that he has been cloned. “It was a Total Recall sequel in everything but name,” says Goldman. “The ‘A’ plot line of one of our sequel ideas was good and bad Arnold — Quaid versus Hauser,” says Shusett, “so that was passe because now he’d done a movie where there were two Arnolds. So we came up with a new concept; they came up with part of the idea, we came up with the rest of it, and they gave it to Arnold and he still said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it.’” At this point, exasperated Dimension executives went back to Matt Cirulnick, giving him a copy of the Shusett-Goldman draft — which he dismisses as “an assault on the English language” — and one piece of guidance from Andrew Rona. “He said, ‘What we’d really like is for the story to end on the same note of ambiguity that the first one did,’” Cirulnick remembers. “And that’s why I really fell in love with getting this assignment, because how do you sequel-ise something that ended on an ambiguous note, without ever resolving what that was? So that was the challenge... I was going to answer it and then not, answer it and then not, and basically leave you at the same point. What was also great was that this was my own original story — I didn’t use anything from the previous scripts, except the cloned Sharon Stones.”

The resulting thirteen-page treatment was greeted with enthusiasm by Rona and Berdincker, the executives overseeing the project for Dimension. “We went down to the Tribeca Grill and just cut up the outline. They’re two great executives,” Cirulnick adds, “and their notes were specific. They gave me strong direction, helped me make the cuts that needed to be made, and I got commenced.” Cirulnick’s first draft, dated 20 April 2000, follows the treatment in most respects — although Quaid’s discovery of a Martian colony living deep beneath the surface was omitted. Cirulnick’s ninety-six-page ‘revised first draft’, dated 8 May 2000, opens with a spectacular action sequence, as Hauser and fellow ‘ReKall Unit’ agents York Brogan (described to put the reader in mind of Ving Rhames), Chris Park (“think Jet Li”) and Quaid’s paramour Maggie Thomas (a Parker Posey type) foil the hijacking by terrorists of a Saturn-bound cruise ship, which culminates with the terrorists’ turbinium bomb being diverted into the sun. As the successful mission ends, Hauser/Quaid wakes to find himself at ReKall, where doctors Bob, Edgemar and Jaslove explain that he suffered a schizoid embolism during his original ReKall trip, and has been effectively comatose for ten years. Here Cirulnick borrows a few elements from the earlier Goldman-Shusett draft: the explanations for Quaid’s assimilation of real-world developments into his dream (the news was on) and his lack of muscle atrophy (“newest thing, Doug — magneti-pulse muscle stimulation”), Lori’s break-up and affair with her personal trainer (although Cirulnick plays the brush-off as a taped vid-phone ‘Dear John’), and Quaid’s subsequent employment on the construction of a space elevator, which, this time, is described as a ‘space bridge’ and is tethered to Mars, which trillionaire industrialist Hugo Strickrodt is preparing to open to the public.

Commencing work at the construction site, Quaid is surprised to meet York Brogan, now calling himself ‘Jones Seni’ and denying all knowledge of his association with Quaid or Hauser. Quaid is more cautious approaching ‘Sue Richards’ (shades of Fantastic Four), a nerdish neighbour who resembles Maggie. When Quaid’s flashbacks cause an accident on the space bridge (itself a flashback to the Goldman-Shusett draft), Quaid injures his arm, peeling away a piece of false skin to reveal scars he suffered in his hijack-foiling fantasy. Now convinced that starting the reactor which gave Mars its atmosphere and foiling the Saturn cruise ship hijack are real memories, not implanted ones, Quaid is pursued by ReKall’s Colonel Ladson — Hauser’s commanding officer in his hijacking memories — who is anxious that Quaid may be about to achieve ‘total recall’ and discover the truth: that he, York Brogan, Chris Park and Maggie are part of a secret cadre of NorthBloc Intelligence operatives so elite even they do not know who they are or what they do — or have done — for the government.

Employing ReKall technology, each operative has dual identities, both stored on digital disk: one disk contains their birth and upbringing through each of their missions logged and catalogued in detail — this is their real, or ‘Alpha’ life. The second disk contains their lives up to a point — their real childhood is used, but at some key juncture a new ‘program’ has been written, with a normal, run-of-the-mill ‘Beta’ life, the identity these elite agents possess when off-mission. Thus, the agents are only restored to their true selves (for Quaid, the Hauser persona) when they are on-mission; as soon as their missions are completed, they resume their Beta lives with no knowledge or memory of their agency activities. “That way,” Brogan tells him, “should we want to betray the agency, or should anyone get their hands on us, we’ll be useless.”

Quaid learns all this from a digital recording of York Brogan (echoes of the cement factory scene from Total Recall), who urges him to break Chris Park out of the Pasternak Institute for the Criminally Insane, where he has been held since his memory implant failed to take. (Quaid is also shown footage of his own mission history, among which Cirulnick slyly includes images from such Schwarzenegger films as Predator, True Lies, The Terminator and Commando.) Meanwhile, things on Earth are hotting up — literally: the turbinium bomb appears to have swollen the sun until it swallows up Mercury and threatens to burn all life on Earth to a cinder. Global warming accelerates on a catastrophic scale, as giant holes appear in the sky, through which deadly heat rays scorch the Earth (a cinematic cataclysm subsequently explored in The Core).

Meanwhile, Quaid helps Chris to escape, the pair head to Mars (disguised as a fat Samoan and his Japanese wife), where Brogan and Maggie appear to be in Strickrodt’s employ, the latter also (much to Quaid’s chagrin) in his bed. Maggie explains that she and Brogan are on a ReKall mission to infiltrate Strickrodt’s inner circle. Through her, they learn that the hijacking was a set-up, and that Strickrodt used them to send the turbinium bomb into the sun, hoping that the devastation of life on Earth would lead its inhabitants to flock to Mars. Quaid and his team counter with a plan of their own: using explosive charges planted in its turbinium core, they intend to blow up Mars, hoping that the resulting “gravity gap” causes the Earth to shift into the vacuum previously occupied by Mars, thus saving the planet from the expanding sun.

Before they can implement their plan, however, Dr Jaslove shows up (à la Dr Edgemar’s second act appearance in Total Recall) and tells him he’s still at ReKall Incorporated, where he has been in a coma ever since the accident on the space bridge — the point at which he ‘discovered’ that his secret agent fantasies were true. His fellow agents, his mission to Mars and Earth’s impending destruction by an expanding sun are all products of his imagination! Dr Jaslove shows him vid-phone images of Earth, his own comatose body and Lori at his bedside, and tells him that if he does not snap out of his delusion, he will suffer a fatal embolism. Quaid refuses to believe, vowing to continue his mission, but as his ‘fantasy’ continues, Ladson floors him with a further revelation: that even his ‘true’ identity, Hauser, was merely the invention of a military supercomputer (provoking the potentially classic Schwarzenegger line, “Then if I’m not me, or Hauser... who the hell am I?”). Refusing to believe any of this, Quaid secures the planting of the turbinium charges and blows up Mars, the fragments of which circle Earth in a ring similar to that of Saturn while Earth assumes the position of the destroyed planet.

No sooner has the explosion occurred, however, than Quaid wakes up at ReKall, where the news announcer is commenting on Mars’ destruction, which has shifted Earth’s orbit and saved it from the swelling sun. “Scientists say the Mars explosion was an unexplained phenomenon, and may be the result of the sun’s growth, which pressurized Mars’ turbinium core,” the anchorwoman announces. “Earth’s a little worse for wear, but she’ll live — and hopefully like her makeover!” Quaid — either denied the credit for saving the planet, or recovered from his schizoid embolism, depending on which version of events he and the audience chooses to believe — is reunited with Maggie/Sue at the space bridge, where they kiss in front of the awe-inspiring view of Earth, complete with its ring of Martian debris — an exact reprise of the Melina/Quaid clinch at the end of Total Recall.

“I turned in the script,” says Cirulnick. “They dug it, Jesse Berdinka dug it, my agents dug it. Everything was cool. I was all fired up. I kept calling and calling, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’” Eventually, Cirulnick heard that Schwarzenegger had read the draft, and that a meeting had been arranged between Bob Weinstein, Andrew Rona and the star. “My understanding is that meeting took place,” the writer says. “I never found out specifically what happened — all I know is after that I got a call from Miramax who asked me would I be interested in rewriting the script to shrink the budget down. Maybe they wanted to cut money out of the below-the-line stuff to give more money to Schwarzenegger. It began to look like they couldn’t make a deal with Schwarzenegger, and it may have had something to do with Miramax not thinking that his stock was high enough for the fee he was asking. After that,” says Cirulnick, “Andrew Rona told me that they were beginning to talk about other people — Vin Diesel’s name was mentioned — but it never happened. I think at the time Vin Diesel was paid $20 million to do xXx, so I guess he wasn’t going to be that much cheaper than Schwarzenegger.”

Although Cirulnick half-expected to be asked to rewrite it for another actor, his agents advised against it: “They said, ‘Look, if it’s not going to go with Schwarzenegger, don’t write any more on the project. You want to have written the script for Schwarzenegger, not some other guy. It’s a dynamite sample, but don’t get too wedded to it.’” For most of 2001 and 2002, Dimension’s partner company, Miramax, suffered a series of flops and financial disasters, including the expensive collapse of Talk magazine, ballooning costs on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and MGM’s abrupt exit from its co-production deal on Chicago — from which it did not recover until Chicago turned a profit in 2003. So when a comprehensive Variety profile failed to mention Total Recall 2 among the future projects either of Miramax or Dimension, Cirulnick surmised that the project was dead. “I think the monetary issue, the economics of the script and the film, and not being able to make a deal with Schwarzenegger cost the film momentum, and that was it,” he says. “I left a man down on the battlefield and there was nothing more that could be done.”

Dimension refused to let it die, however, offering Shusett and Goldman a chance to write another draft: “They called us and said, ‘Here’s Matt’s ideas — let’s blend them with your action set pieces, which we love,’ because, as we do in the first one, we had a lot of unusual special effects ideas, some humorous, some bizarre. They said, ‘Can you fit these into Matt’s plot?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’” Shusett and Goldman wrote what they describe as “a beat sheet, just five or six pages,” showing how a new version, combining Cirulnick’s story with their set pieces, might look. “Andrew Rona said, ‘This is wonderful — it’s a combination of what Matt had come up with and how you guys see it having to be re-channelled to fit your action sequences. I’ll give this to Arnold right now.’ And Bob said, ‘I’m completely convinced that you guys can deliver on the script. If [Arnold] buys the concept, we’ll make the movie.’” Yet again, Schwarzenegger shot down the script.

In the meantime, former Carolco partners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar reunited to form C2 Productions, one of their first moves being to purchase the rights to Schwarzenegger’s most successful franchise, the Terminator series. While James Cameron, director of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, passed on the chance to make Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Schwarzenegger agreed to reprise his most famous role, with Breakdown writer-director Jonathan Mostow at the helm. Around the same time, Vajna and Kassar entered negotiations with Dimension to re-acquire the sequel rights to Total Recall. Although that deal reportedly fell apart in early 2003, the $75 million US opening of Terminator 3 put Arnie back on the box office map, leading Shusett and Goldman to approach Bob Weinstein with yet another concept, presented as a five-page treatment.

“We have a lot of funny new ideas, including six or seven very unique and funny and bizarre set pieces which we wrote in our ’98 draft which we’re transplanting into this,” Goldman said in 2004. “The plot will be very complex again, and very much fantasy versus reality. We hope to shock the audience — something that most films would be afraid to do — by having the audience think something completely different as to how they interpreted the first movie. You see that in the first half hour. And that’ll be the first shock. And from then it’ll go on twisting back and forth towards ‘fantasy versus reality’, but with a new storyline involving a new leading lady.” And possibly a new leading man. “The way we’ve sent it to him is flexible,” Shusett notes, “so if Arnold’s not available, or he doesn’t want to do it, or ends up being Governor of California, it can be done with another actor.”

Although Goldman and Shusett’s plans for Total Recall 2 came to nought, interest in the property remained relatively constant, not least because of associations with the ‘recall’ of California Governor Gray Davis, prompting a snap election in which he was replaced by Schwarzenegger himself. Although this, naturally, led to some humorous Internet memes revolving around the Total Recall concept, Schwarzenegger’s governorship put his acting career on hiatus for the next eight years. By the time he was back, plans were well underway not for a sequel to Total Recall, but a remake, based on a new screenplay by Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet, Salt), Mark Bomback (Die Hard 4.0, aka Live Free or Die Hard) and James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man). With a cast led by Colin Farrell — who, in an example of synchronicity worthy of Philip K. Dick himself, had co-starred in Spielberg’s Minority Report — the film was scheduled for release in 2012, more than two decades after the release of the original.

Fans clamouring for a sequel would have to make do with Dynamite Entertainment’s four-issue comic book miniseries, scripted by Vince Moore, the storyline of which was a direct continuation of the 1990 film. “Nowadays I think it’s hard to have strong feelings about movies, given how many older movies are being remade,” Moore told Comic Book Resources on the eve of the first issue’s publication. “I loved the original movie. It in turn led to my reading of the source short story and enjoying that as a very different experience. I’m sure the new movie will be its own experience as well. I am curious to see what the new version of Total Recall will look like,” he added, “and I hope it does well. But it will be its own thing and may not have anything in common with the ’90s film other than the title.” Not to worry, though. “After all,” runs the final line of the Philip K. Dick short story that all of the various adaptations share, “the real one probably would not be long in coming.”

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES

Separating fact from fiction in the development of Indy IV

“I was done with the Indiana Jones series, and Harrison got very proactive with both George and [me] and said, ‘I want to play Indy one more time.’ So he started this. Blame him.”

— Steven Spielberg

When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released in 1989, director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas and actor Harrison Ford insisted that after three blockbusting adventures — two of them in the all-time box office top ten — the whip-cracking archaeologist Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr was hanging up his battered fedora for good; The Last Crusade would also be Indy’s last adventure. “There was a reason I invented the shot of Harrison Ford riding a horse into the sunset,” said Spielberg, “because I thought that brought the curtain down on the trilogy.”

Fans continued to pester the triumvirate about the possibility of another sequel though, and in 1994, at a Venice Film Festival press conference, Harrison Ford let slip that he was “reading scripts” for a fourth Indy film — and the rumours began. Although it would be another fourteen years before ideas coalesced, schedules aligned and enthusiasm returned to make Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2007/2008, the intervening period saw no shortage of proposed storylines and scripts for the fourth film, all purporting to be the real ‘Indy IV’.

Lucas first dreamed up the character of Indiana Jones in 1973, four years before Star Wars made movie history. Named after Lucas’ enormous malamute dog (also the inspiration for Chewbacca), ’Indiana’ Smith was conceived as an archaeologist-adventurer who used the spoils of his relic hunting expeditions to finance a lavish playboy lifestyle. Although Indy’s rough-around-the-edges appeal also channelled everyone from Cary Grant to Humphrey Bogart, Indy had a quality seldom found in his silver screen forebears: he was generally either out of his depth, or deep in trouble. “Indy was always in over his head,” Lucas noted. “He wasn’t up to what he was supposed to be, to be what the old classic Republic serial hero was.”

Lucas fleshed out the idea with his friend and fellow filmmaker Philip Kaufman, who would later direct an update of ’50s sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “He got very excited about it,” Lucas recalled, “and we started working on it for three or four weeks. He had the idea of making the supernatural, sacred object that we were looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Then Phil went off to work on a Clint Eastwood movie,” he added, referring to Kaufman’s script for the 1976 Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, “so I put it back on the shelf and let it gather some more dust. And then I shot Star Wars.”

It was while Lucas and Spielberg were holidaying in Hawaii, to escape the furore of Star Wars’ opening weekend, that Lucas first mentioned his idea to his friend. “I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to direct a James Bond picture,’” Spielberg recalled, “and George said, ‘I have a better idea, called Raiders of the Lost Ark.’” Spielberg, who, like Lucas, grew up on swashbuckling adventure serials, immediately responded to the tales of derring-do. “I told him how it was about an archaeologist,” said Lucas, “and how it was like a Saturday matinee serial, and he got in one mess after another, and he said, ‘Fantastic. Let’s do this.’” There was only one thing Spielberg didn’t like: the name, ‘Indiana’ Smith. “I said, ‘All right, what if we called him ‘Indiana’ Jones.’ He said, “Okay, that’s fine.’”

Next, they needed a writer to turn their story outline into a fully-fledged first draft. Spielberg had just optioned Continental Divide, a script by a young writer named Lawrence Kasdan, whom he felt might be suitable for the job. Three days were spent outlining the character, the plot and the set pieces, the results of which, Kasdan has said, closely resemble the final film. “Larry added so much wit and humour, and brought in such a 1930s Preston Sturges meets Michael Curtiz [vibe],” Spielberg recalled. “Larry layered it and flavoured it and brought it to life.”

By now, the sheen of Spielberg’s first two theatrical blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had been tarnished somewhat by the critical and commercial failure of 1941, and the director saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as the perfect comeback. “I was really tired when 1941 came out,” he told Empire in 2006, the 25th anniversary of Raiders’ release. “I didn’t know how to take a punch, and I kind of took the sting of all the criticism and verbal abuse the movie was receiving. I wanted to go back to work and make a movie that didn’t take 178 days and go so far over budget. I wanted to have fun.” But if Spielberg and Lucas thought the combined clout of Star Wars and Jaws was enough to guarantee a green-light for their $20 million action-adventure, they were wrong: Raiders of the Lost Ark was turned down by every studio in Hollywood, before Paramount decided to give it the go-ahead. Now all they needed was a leading man.

Spielberg’s first suggestion was Harrison Ford, a supporting actor in two of Lucas’ earlier films, American Graffiti and Star Wars. Lucas, however, resisted. “I didn’t want him to be my Bobby De Niro, where he was in every one of my movies,” he explained, referring to Martin Scorsese’s long-term partnership with the star of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. After testing Tim Matheson, Peter Coyote and others, it was Tom Selleck’s screen test (with future Blade Runner actress Sean Young) that convinced Lucas and Spielberg they found their man. Unfortunately, Selleck was committed to a TV show, Magnum P.I., and would not be available to shoot Raiders. “I said, ‘What will we do now?’” Lucas recalled. “Steve said, ‘What about Harrison?”

Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in US cinemas on 21 June 1981, instantly making stars of both Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones. When the film grossed $242 million in the US, a total of $432 million worldwide (equivalent to over $1 billion in today’s box office), and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, it was clear that Indy would be back. Sure enough, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade appeared in 1984 and 1989 respectively, grossing $348 million and $418 million worldwide. A television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, followed in 1992, which spanned Indy’s life from age ten, travelling with his father, to ninety-three — with an elderly, one-eyed Indy relating stories from his younger days at the beginning of each new episode. (Except for 1993’s Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues, which featured a cameo from Harrison Ford, who took time off from filming The Fugitive to appear as a bearded, fifty year-old Indy in the story’s framing sequence.)

On 11 November 1994, five years after The Last Crusade and a few weeks after Harrison Ford set the Indy IV ball rolling at the Venice Film Festival, a story appeared in UK tabloid The Daily Mail claiming that Speed star Sandra Bullock would play Indy’s “sparky” sidekick in the fourth installment of the franchise, entitled Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent. According to the article, which appeared in Baz Bamigboye’s column under the headline “From Speed to Ford Escort”, The Lost Continent begins as one of Indy’s students (Bullock) uncovers an ancient artefact which she believes holds a clue to the whereabouts of the lost continent of Atlantis. “When Jones gets wind of his student’s find, he prepares to set off on one last quest,” the story continued. “However, his plans are scuppered since the girl refuses to allow him to go along without her. The lost continent and its otherworldly inhabitants are ultimately discovered in an air pocket beneath the ocean bed, just as the nuclear testing begins on Bikini Atoll, threatening the lost tribe of Atlantis with total extinction.”

Nothing further surfaced with regard to this potential storyline — which bore a passing resemblance to a 1992 computer game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis — and it has since been revealed as the work of a highly-paid hoaxer who bamboozled Bamigboye into thinking it was the real deal. “Baz Bamigboye was hungry for stories at the time,” admits the story’s anonymous source. “I’d broken a story about Pierce Brosnan being cast as James Bond, and ever since then, Baz had been hounding me for stories. So finally, I gave him one — mainly to prove to my mum that most of the stories in the Mail are made up.”

On 21 March 1995, Variety reported that a fourth installment was unlikely to happen any time soon: “While Nazis and various cultists couldn’t stop Indy, the lack of a suitable script has pushed back the fourth installment in the series for the time being. Ford, director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas hoped to make the Indy pic the actor’s next project after Sabrina for Sydney Pollack. They turned loose screenwriter Jeb Stuart on a story conceived by Lucas. Stuart... has just turned in his second draft. Early indications are more work is needed [on the script].” Around the same time, The Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the story concerned an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico — possibly both. Although this was the first indication that aliens might have something to do with the fourth film, no story details were given when the Lucasfilm Fan Club confirmed to its members that Boam, who wrote several Indiana Jones-style set pieces into his script for The Phantom, was working on a story that Lucas reportedly liked.

Besides, Spielberg — who had already explored extra-terrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. — was cooling on the idea of Indy vs aliens. “I said, ‘George, I don’t want to do any more aliens.’ But George insisted, he said ‘This’ll be like one of those 1950s B-movies Earth vs The Flying Saucers.’” “It was the idea of taking the genre from the adventure serials of the 1930s to the science fiction B-pictures of the 1950s,” Lucas explained. “I said if we move the whole thing into the fifties, which would be age-appropriate for Harrison, that would be the cinematic equivalent.” When, in 1994, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, an action-adventure spectacle based around an alien invasion, became a global success, Spielberg felt that the idea of ‘Indy vs The Flying Saucers’ had run out of mileage. “I called George up and said, ‘Hey this movie’s really a lot of fun, it’s brilliantly directed by Roland Emmerich, it’s just got everything you want in a movie, it’s got humour, it’s got drama. We can’t do aliens!’” Lucas agreed — up to a point. “I thought, maybe I can do ‘ancient civilizations developed by aliens’ without flying saucers, and see if that might work,” he said, alluding to ground covered in Erich von Däniken’s 1971 bestseller Chariots of the Gods, and later by Emmerich’s StarGate. Thus, the extra-terrestrials of early Indy IV treatments became “inter-dimensional beings” that merely looked like aliens, and flew in what looked suspiciously like spacecraft — one of which crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

On 29 May 1996, a script entitled Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness and credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas) appeared on the Internet, supposedly posted by a courier who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm’s offices in San Francisco. The script concerned a race by Indy (complete with wife and daughter) to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah’s Ark — a Judeo-Christian artefact which fit nicely into the pattern (Ark of the Covenant, Holy Grail) of previous Indy films, but which had already been the focus of a Lucasfilm-approved novel, Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge, set twenty years before (and, therefore, canonically incompatible with) the events of the script. A day after its initial posting, the script was removed from the site at the specific request of Lucasfilm Ltd — an occurrence that did nothing to stem the tide of conspiracy theories, since the company would have wanted the script removed whether it was genuine or not. Nevertheless, after a week of frenzied newsgroup activity, guesswork and/or detective work on behalf of Indy fans, a Lucasfilm spokesperson confirmed to America Online that the script was a work of copyright-violating fan fiction. It would be a further four months before the true story behind the fake script emerged, when ambitious Indy fan and aspiring screenwriter Robert Smith owned up to writing the bogus Sons of Darkness script and posting it to the Internet, having failed to submit it to Lucasfilm through legitimate channels.

Talking to Charles Deemer of the Internet Screenwriters Network, Smith admitted that he had sent the 166-page script to an agency that initially promised to submit it to Lucasfilm, but then went back on its word. Smith got no further when he called to plead his case to Lucasfilm itself — unsurprising, since no legitimate production company accepts unsolicited material. “About a year later it occurred to me to try and get Lucasfilm’s attention by posting my Indy script on the Internet,” Smith continued. “I knew I’d have to take a radical approach, so I concocted a courier theft story and posted it to all the film discussion groups. In a matter of days the site ‘hit’ counter jumped from 0 to 300 and snowballed from there on.” A week later, Smith received his first ‘cease and desist’ order by e-mail. “I got Lucasfilm’s attention, but I felt it wasn’t enough. So with the help of some brave friends of mine, we moved the script to a new site and set up a comments page where readers of the script could leave their two cents’ worth. At the same time, the Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg news groups were all abuzz with chatter of the stolen script posted on the net.”

Fan feedback was mixed, regardless of whether the commentators believed the script to be genuine or bogus. “I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy,” added Smith. “I thank them sincerely. And to the naysayers I bow to your abilities at sniffing out a forgery.” Lucasfilm was not prepared to sit back and watch its copyright violated, however. “Four ‘cease and desist’ orders later I pulled the plug and shut down,” Smith explained. “At that point, I felt I’d rocked the boat sufficiently enough that Lucasfilm had no choice but to deal with me.” They did: by sending the police round to his friend’s workplace. “To make a long story short, my friend ratted me out and I was obliged to give the constable a call... I assured the constable that I wouldn’t do anything like that again (wink) and hung up with the constable’s promise that he’d put in a good word for me at Lucasfilm.” Smith concluded by apologising for his actions, dissuading anyone else from emulating them, and thanking Lucasfilm for its tolerance. “My Internet fugitive days are over,” he said. “In my letters to Lucasfilm I apologised and explained that my actions weren’t malicious in any way and that I simply wanted someone to read my script. I guess one could chalk it up to the actions of a desperate screenwriter.”

Almost a year passed before any further mention of Indy IV. Then, on 24 March 1997, during an interview with Barbara Walters, Harrison Ford was asked if he would play Indiana Jones again. “In a New York minute,” he replied swiftly. “It’s a question of Steven Spielberg and I finding a slot we have in common.” Two months later — while the ever-reliable London Daily Mail was ‘reporting’ that Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness would feature Kevin Costner as Indy’s ‘bad seed’ brother — Spielberg told Time magazine that he expected to direct a fourth Indy movie, but needed to do “a lot between now and then that will frighten me.” In July, during a press conference for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas went further, stating: “We’re working on a screenplay for [a fourth] Indiana Jones and it’s really now a matter of trying to get Steven and Harrison and all our schedules so that we can actually work on it, because everyone is so busy.”

In October of the same year, archaeologists at the website Ain’t It Cool News unearthed a sacred find: what appeared to be a genuine Indy IV script, labouring under the multiple-choice title “Indiana Jones IV aka Indiana Jones and the Monkey King aka Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,” and written by Chris Columbus — who wrote Gremlins and The Goonies for Spielberg, and later directed Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films.

The script put Indy, Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliot’s character), an attractive English anthropologist named Dr Clare Clarke, and ‘Scraggy’, a Portuguese guide, on the trail of a legendary Chinese artefact believed to hold the secret of eternal life. “The script had to do with the lost city of Sun Wu-Kung, a stone monkey, a golden hooped staff and ‘The Garden of Immortal Peaches’,” said Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool’s redoubtable webmaster. “The only recurring character from the past besides Indy was Brody,” he added, “but [in the story] he has been on the other side for quite some time now. Nazis and evil Chinese Pirates are the bad guys.” Compared to the first three Indy films, he added, Columbus’ script was “by far the most ‘fantastical’ in terms of mysticism and such.” Despite the fact that the script was purportedly dated 10 February 1995, it seemed obvious from the setting (the year 1937) and the theme (immortality) that this was more likely a rejected script for the third installment of the Indiana Jones series, not the fourth.

A few months after the appearance of Columbus’ rejected draft, on 15 January 1998, another website, Dark Horizons, posted what it claimed to be the opening pages of another script, entitled Raiders of the Fallen Empire, which supposedly concerned Indy’s discovery of the Garden of Eden. Although even the title seemed dubious — for the 1999 video release, Raiders of the Lost Ark would be quietly retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark to tie it in with its prequel and sequel, much as Lucas had appended Star Wars with the sobriquet Episode IV: A New Hope — confirmation of the script’s religious theme seemed to come from a respected theologian in Moscow, Idaho, who claimed to have been hired to fact-check a script with this subject matter. The script segment, amounting to just a few pages, was subsequently taken down — not, this time, due to pressure from Lucasfilm, but at the request of the extract’s author, who claimed that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

In April, Cinescape magazine reported receiving yet another script, entitled Indiana Jones: The Law of One, which dealt with Indy’s pursuit of a powerful ancient device responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. The magazine’s editors judged it “a fake or at the very least a ‘spec’ script”, and a month later, broke the real story in an interview with Star Wars producer Rick McCallum. “We finished the script about three years ago,” he said, presumably referring to Boam’s early draft. “[But] at the time we finished it, Harrison Ford had two years’ worth of commitments, Spielberg was just starting DreamWorks and George Lucas and I were in the middle of Star Wars: Episode I. The plan is that in the next five years, George and I finish Episode II and Episode III of Star Wars and then we will definitely do another Indy,” he added. “Our plan is that viewers can take the forty-four hours we did of the Young Indiana Jones [TV series], where you watch Indy born in 1899, and then you follow him in the movies through the end of the 1950s. We see these movies as a chronicle of the century.”

The same month, Ain’t It Cool claimed that the title Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent was what “they would probably stick with [now that] the ‘Area 51’ story has been dropped in favour of the new one that follows the lines of the lost city of Atlantis.” Ford dismissed such rumours during an appearance on Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson’s talk show on 9 June 1998. “We just haven’t really settled on a script idea yet,” he said. “Hopefully, something will come along.” A month later, the Chicago Herald-Tribune’s Cindy Pearlman quoted Steven Spielberg as saying “The Indiana Jones 4 hat is halfway on my head,” while Ain’t It Cool went further: “We don’t have a start date for it because we still don’t have a script, but we do have an idea of what type of villain it should be, but it won’t be a Nazi. Everyone’s on board for the picture but don’t look for it for a couple of years.” A few months later, a spokesperson for Paramount Pictures told Empire magazine that the official position was that “there is no official position. They may all be on the verge of signing contracts, but since no public announcement has been made, officially there is no Indiana Jones 4.”

On 2 December 1998, a little over a year after Ain’t It Cool unearthed Chris Columbus’ rejected screenplay, website Indyfan.com published a synopsis of a script entitled Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars, purportedly written by Jeb Stuart (48 HRS, The Fugitive) from a story by Stuart and Lucas. “The script, labelled as the final draft and dated 1995, involves an alien artefact which continuously changes possession between Indy, Russian baddies, and saucer men [ie, extra-terrestrials],” the report stated.

Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars opens in Borneo in 1949, as Indy manages to keep a stolen idol from falling into the hands of pirates. Later, he meets a beautiful and brilliant linguist, Dr Elaine McGregor, who hires Indy to join her at a dig site, where she is captured by the same pirates, and rescued by Indy. Elaine and Indy fall in love and decide to get married, but the wedding is interrupted by the arrival of Elaine’s ex-husband, Bolander, who spirits her away to White Sands, New Mexico, where a spacecraft has crash landed, killing its alien occupants. While the Americans and (Communist) Russians engage in a race to discover the secrets of the alien ship’s fuel supply — a stone cylinder covered in hieroglyphics — Indy finds himself at the test site of an atomic bomb, and later on an out of control aircraft which he and Elaine escape as another alien spacecraft appears to retrieve the cylinder.

They subsequently hide out in a hot-wired pickup truck at a desert drive-in movie theatre (showing, for good measure, a cheesy ’50s sci-fi movie), meet Sanskrit-speaking aliens, get arrested, escape, witness Bolander’s incineration by the cylinder and the departure of the aliens, and finally get married, driving off into the sunset with Short Round at the wheel. “Besides being convoluted and unbelievable,” Indyfan.com’s correspondent complained, “the storyline ends in indulgent sappiness, with Indy marrying the lady linguist who accompanied him throughout the adventure. The ceremony is witnessed by Sallah, Marion, Willie, Short Round, and Henry Jones Sr.”

For years, it remained unclear whether or not the Saucer Man from Mars script was genuine. One paragraph of the synopsis, however, appears to prove its veracity. “The Russians, having packed Indy into the trunk of their car, drive out into the desert to a secret rendezvous. They get lost and stop in a town called Boomsburg. They go into the gas station to ask for directions. As they do so, Indy jimmies the trunk and escapes. He checks the houses and finds that they are all fake, full of props and mannequins. Suddenly, the civil defense siren goes off and the Russians bolt for their car, burning rubber. Indy runs into a kitchen and leaps into a 2’ deep crawlspace on the floor. He then pulls a lead-lined refrigerator over top. An A-Bomb goes off, blowing away the two Russians and destroying the town. Somehow, the concrete-lined hole and the fridge protect Indy. A decon team arrives, finds him alive and scrub him radiation free.” The fact that this scene, evidently conceived by Lucas, appears in later drafts as well the final film (and Frank Darabont’s subsequent draft, also based on Lucas’ story) — along with the line, “Saucer Men from Mars,” spoken by an incredulous Dr Jones — would appear to confirm that the Stuart script was genuine after all.

Less than a fortnight after the Saucer Men from Mars synopsis leaked, Ain’t It Cool described yet another potential storyline, this time supposedly taken from a treatment an unnamed writer had submitted to Creative Artists Agency. “Indy, working in Egypt, circa 1947, encounters a mysterious Egyptian at the great pyramids. It turns out that he has escaped from Atlantis and needs to prevent the destruction of the Atlanteans. He is to marry the King’s daughter, but his fellow Egyptian has heard of the surface world and wants to raise Atlantis. This second Egyptian is none other than the ancient Pharaoh-God, Ramses. He is now a mummy and plans to destroy the Atlanteans, who are alien in origin, and raise the continent through the triggering of a massive earthquake. Indy finds Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — [apparently] the city was spared because they trapped themselves inside a giant dome. There an Egyptian minority population still thrives. Indy must choose between the rise of the world’s greatest archaeological find and the death of the Atlanteans, or to help preserve the marriage of the Egyptian to his Atlantean love by joining him to defeat Ramses.”

The pseudonymous poster, ‘KABOOM’, was perhaps unaware that the Atlantis theme had been the subject of numerous other rumours over the years, or that Universal was already filming an Egyptian-themed Indiana Jones clone entitled The Mummy. More tellingly, KABOOM’s post was accompanied by the following subjective (not to mention immodest) endorsement of his or her story outline: “As you can see, the story is magnificent, with room to add tremendous conflict and spectacular visuals. Imagine when Indy approaches Atlantis and enters the dazzling city! It also introduces an awesome villain and great supporting characters that we will actually care about their fate! I hope they go with this treatment, it would be awesome.”

Barely a month passed before another, only slightly more credible story emerged. On 12 January 1999, Cinescape Insider reported the existence of a script entitled Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur, credited to Jeffrey Boam, with pages marked ‘Property of Lucasfilm Ltd’ and ‘Final Draft’. (The latter marking casts some doubt on the legitimacy of the script, since professional screenwriters will seldom, if ever, tempt the fates by writing ‘final draft’ on a script. It could, however, be a reference to the best-selling screenwriting software of that name, though in practice scripts written and/or printed out in this format display no reference to the software with which they are written.)

As expected from the title, the script concerned a search by Indy for King Arthur’s magical sword, Excalibur, reputedly hidden on Enigma Island, a small isle off the Spanish coast, six centuries earlier. The Nazis are after it too, as are the surviving descendants of the original Knights of the Round Table, who help Indy and his companions — Anthony Brody (Marcus’ son) and new friends Arianna Smith (a kind of female Indy, as might be guessed from the name) and Sebastian Collins (a dead ringer for Frasier actor David Hyde Pierce, and soon revealed to be the villain of the piece) — recover the sword, only to have it snatched from their grasp by the arm of a woman who reaches up from beneath the Atlantic Ocean to reclaim it forever. (One of the script’s more imaginative moments is a battle with Collins, during which Indy loses an eye, leaving him sporting a very fetching eye patch — thus explaining the elderly Indy’s appearance in the TV series.) At the end, Indy goes back to teaching, and prepares to embark on his next adventure: settling down with Arianna.

Less than a fortnight after the initial posting, the Sword of Arthur script was revealed to be the work of two aspiring screenwriters, Steven Frye and Michael Prentice. “The two of us wrote Sword of Arthur back in 1996 as a lark idea,” Prentice admitted to Micah Johnson, host of website Indyfan.com. “Neither of us are professional writers, we’re just fans who enjoy the Indy series. The whole Sons of Darkness fiasco had happened and we felt a better job could be done, so he and I wrote up the story, [while] I went ahead and did a first draft of the script. We hoped maybe something could happen with it, but mainly, we wrote it in the spirit of fun. We just wanted to write a halfway decent story.” Prentice went on to say that, in mid-1997, he had been duped into sending the script to an unscrupulous character with purported connections to Spielberg, but who was subsequently found to be selling it as a script by Jeffrey Boam. (For the record, Boam died on 24 January 2000 without ever commenting on the Sword of Arthur affair.)

Although imitators had been plentiful in the years since The Last Crusade, notably in the bestselling Tomb Raider video games, the success of The Mummy in May 1999 suggested that the audience’s appetite for Indy-style period adventures with a supernatural twist had not been fully sated. Two months later, on 14 July 1999, Rick McCallum revealed some official Indy IV info at a joint Lucasfilm/LucasArts press conference in London. “We’ve got a fantastic script, and everyone really wants to do it,” he said. “We’ve now got to wait for everyone to be free,” he added. “George is tied up, as you know; Steven is busy for a couple of years; and Harrison is committed for the next eighteen months. But the script is great and age is not a problem. I think we’ll get it together in about three or four years.” Although no title had been agreed on, McCallum concluded with an elliptical reference to the storyline: “Watch the stars... and watch the desert.” Could this have been a none-too-cryptic reference to the widely circulated Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars script, credited to Jeb Stuart?

Just three days after McCallum’s comments, an Ain’t It Cool scooper named ‘Makman’, who claimed to be an insider at a “San Francisco company” — Lucasfilm and several of its subsidiaries are based in San Francisco — announced that the fourth Indiana Jones film only existed as a twelve-page treatment, with the working title Indiana Jones and the Red Scare. “It takes place in the early fifties,” Makman revealed, “Indy is retired from gallivanting across the globe. He is the department chair of the archeology department at Princeton. Henry Jones Sr is gravely ill and lives with Indy in their modest home just off of campus. Papa Jones has maybe six months to live. He has a live-in nurse. Indy is weathered and very much looking his age. He longs for excitement but knows his days are over. He wants to marry, pass on the Jones name. He spends most of his time with his father and a middle-aged history professor named Gladys, whose affection he wins from another colleague at a faculty dinner — a hilarious opening sequence in the true Indy form.”

The gist of the story, Makman went on, sees Indy employed by President Eisenhower’s administration to obtain information about the Russians’ retrieval of some dubious artefacts found in Hitler’s bunker after the raid on Berlin at the end of the Second World War. “Hitler, as we know, was into the occult and it seems Russia is now in possession of all the documents and oddities found with the Nazi Führer. Sallah returns,” he/she added, “and Indy’s new lady friend is a blacklisted author well versed in the occult and deemed a Communist.” Although the chronology and ‘Red menace’ aspects of the storyline seemed to chime with Lucas’ developing story, it is unlikely that Indiana Jones and the Red Scare was ever anything other than yet another fake.

Towards the end of 1999, genuine news came thick and fast. First, Spielberg admitted that he, Lucas and Ford were considering three separate scripts. Secondly, Ford rebutted suggestions that, having recently turned sixty, he was too old to play Indy, being virtually a relic himself — “I’m still quite fit enough to fake it,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “It’s all smoke and mirrors anyway.” Lucas told the same show that the script search had been narrowed to two possibilities. “All I’m waiting for is a phone call from Steven and Harrison,” he said. “I’m ready to go.” A week later, Ford told E! Online that he was “ready when they’re ready”, suggesting that it was Spielberg who was causing the delay. The director admitted as much in one of the interviews accompanying the 26 October 1999 video release of the Indiana Jones Trilogy — featuring the retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark — although his reasons for hesitating were laudable: “We don’t want the fourth Indiana Jones movie to leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth.”

The script appeared to be the sticking point. “If there was a script they all loved, they would kill themselves to clear their schedules,” Ford’s agent, Patricia McQueeney, told USA Today columnist Jeannie Williams. “They love [Indiana Jones] so much, but they can’t seem to get their heads together on a script they are all enthusiastic about.” Interviewed in the London Sunday Express around the same time, however, Rick McCallum suggested that work had been completed on the script as early as 1999, and that the delay was due to “everybody having commitments years in advance.” Indeed, appearing on the British TV show The Big Breakfast to promote Random Hearts, Ford said, “Steven and George will not be available until 2005, and I don’t know whether I’ll be fit or interested at that point. I hope it could happen before that.” Appearing on Larry King Live, Spielberg subsequently promised that the film would happen eventually, so long as “Harrison isn’t too old to jump, and I’m not too old to yell.”

Spielberg, Lucas and Ford continued to keep hopes for a fourth film alive, not least because the question came up so often. “I want it to happen,” Ford announced during the taping of his appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio in early 2000. “There is no script yet that everybody is really happy with. George is a bit preoccupied with that other movie,” he added, referring to the ongoing Star Wars saga, “but Steven and I are very ambitious to do it. But we all realize it has to be great.” A month later, at a Director’s Guild of America honouring Spielberg with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Spielberg admitted that the question he was asked most often is “Dad, when are you going to make a new Indiana Jones film?” and delighted Indy fans everywhere with a promise: “Indiana Jones is coming back soon.” How soon was difficult to say: with A.I. due to begin shooting in July 2000, followed by Minority Report in April 2001, Spielberg’s definition of “soon” appeared to grow less and less distinct.

Around the same time, an intriguing new development occurred in the saga of Indiana Jones IV. On 15 February 2000, eight days after Spielberg underwent kidney surgery, the Coming Attractions website posted a rumour, “completely unconfirmed and graded as an 8 on the rumour-mongering scale,” that M. Night Shyamalan, acclaimed writer-director of The Sixth Sense, had been approached by Spielberg to discuss the possibility of writing an Indiana Jones script. (Shyamalan had been inspired to become a filmmaker himself after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the age of twelve.) Coming Attractions’ effort to distance itself from the rumour appeared to have been unwarranted when, on 22 June, Variety published a story entitled “Arnold & Indy: They’ll Be Back” which appeared to confirm that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford were “in the process of drafting” Shyamalan to pen the new script, although, even if he accepted the assignment, Shyamalan would not be available to start work until he wrapped production of his next film, Unbreakable.

A week later, the MovieHeadlines website called Lucasfilm’s Jeanne Cole to clarify the story, which turned out to be only partially correct: Shyamalan was apparently only one of several writers being considered; no deal was in place, but the project was being actively worked on, being one that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford were all enthusiastic about. In November, MovieHeadlines quoted Shyamalan as saying that he would “have to think about” writing Indy IV. “There are a lot of things on my plate.” It was not until July of the following year that Ain’t It Cool finally laid rest to the rumours by quoting Shyamalan as follows: “I was never contacted formally to do the project. I did publicly express interest, but nothing really ever came to fruition. I have talked with all of them besides George,” he added, “and it sounds exciting. They have their ideas and I, of course, as a fan, have ideas of how they should do it.”

Other, less high-profile fans continued to have their ideas, however. In mid-2000, a forty-two-page treatment entitled Indiana Jones and the Tomb of Ice began circulating on the Internet, its format somewhere between a script, a treatment and a work of prose fiction (stage directions, scripted dialogue and scene transitions are juxtaposed with sections of reported speech). Set in 1949, the story follows Indy, his father and pretty palaeolinguist Abigail Shaw to northern Siberia, where Russians have discovered what appears to be King Arthur’s mortal remains, along with his magic sword, Excalibur. The sword proves to be merely the tip of the iceberg, as Indy and Abby discover when they reach northern Siberia and discover the titular tomb, which is none other than Valhalla itself, and guarded by an army of Viking ghosts. Unlike Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur, another script which used Excalibur and the legend of King Arthur as its basis, there was little doubt that Indiana Jones and the Tomb of Ice was a work of fan fiction — albeit one for which, somewhat mysteriously, no one has since claimed authorship...

In October 2000, in an interview posted on the Internet Movie Database, Ford said he was “looking forward” to doing a fourth Indy. “It’s a great character that I’ve enjoyed playing in the past and I would like to revisit him,” he said. “I think the movies are great entertainment and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and I have spent a lot of time discussing how we would like to proceed with the next Indiana story. We’re still hammering out the details,” he added, “but I’m pretty confident we’re going to do another Indy, although it might be at least a year or more before our respective schedules allow us to do it. I’d personally love to work with Sean Connery again. I think audiences would enjoy seeing us back together.” Asked if Indy would age gracefully, he responded, “I think we have to show that he’s suffered some wear and tear over the years. That’s going to make his character that much more interesting. For me, adding some flaws and layers is what is going to make Indy even more interesting. We can address issues like whether his character’s virtues are based on his youth or on other aspects of human nature like his wisdom, his toughness, his resourcefulness, his integrity. A lot of work went into creating Indy and giving him a certain history and identity, and I think it will be extremely fascinating to expand on that. It’s something that I think the public would enjoy watching.”

In a February 2001 interview with The New York Times, screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) revealed that he had received a call in January asking if he was interested in writing the next Indiana Jones movie. By July, however, Kathleen Kennedy was telling the Calgary Sun that there had been a lot of discussion “but to be honest there is no script because there isn’t even a writer in place. It sounds like a slam dunk to do another Indiana Jones,” she went on, “but you have to get everyone available and committed and then you have to get a screenplay that excites everyone. In reality that could probably take years.” Even more alarming was the fact that the gross participation of the ‘Big Three’ could run to $150 million, leaving Paramount Pictures with little more than small change for financing the film. (20th Century Fox had found itself in a similar position with the second Star Wars trilogy, for which it was paid a small percentage for distribution of films which Lucas had financed himself.)

Nevertheless, at a party for the 2002 Golden Globe awards, a different triumvirate — Spielberg, Ford and Kate Capshaw (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom actress and now Mrs Spielberg) — confirmed to Fox News reporter Roger Friedman that Indiana Jones would return in a new adventure. “We have a title, but we’re not ready to announce it,” Spielberg said, adding that Capshaw’s character, Willie Scott, would also return — and not via a flashback. The following day, Spielberg’s publicist, Marvin Levy, was doing damage control, insisting that Indy IV would not, as Spielberg had implied, be his next picture. Nevertheless, Levy told E! Online, “Right now, Steven’s been described as being in ‘development heaven’. They do have a story they like and they have a title... [but] they don’t have a script.” This was an odd admission, given Ford’s comment to Fox News the night before: “It was always about getting the right script, and now we have it.”

Apparently, they did not. On 23 April, Variety mentioned that Tom Stoppard, the acclaimed British playwright and screenwriter whose script for Shakespeare in Love won him an Academy Award, and who had worked uncredited on The Last Crusade, had been approached to write the next Indy installment. Barely a week later, producer Kathleen Kennedy dismissed the suggestion, stating that another (unidentified) writer would begin writing in June and submit a first draft by early autumn.

It was three weeks before IGN FilmForce broke the news that the mystery writer was none other than Frank Darabont, who wrote numerous episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series before turning writer-director with such films as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. (More recently, he had written an uncredited draft of Spielberg’s Minority Report, and directed Jim Carrey in the misfire The Majestic.) Speaking to MTV Movie House reporter Master P at Skywalker Ranch on 24 May, Lucas would neither confirm nor deny the Darabont rumours. “We’re in the process of hiring a writer,” he said, “and hopefully we’ll be able to start shooting... not next year, but probably the year after [2004].” By the end of May 2002, not only had Variety confirmed the rumours regarding Frank Darabont, but a release date had been set: 1 July 2005 — the beginning of the five-day Fourth of July weekend, and a few days short of Harrison Ford’s sixty-third birthday.

“George called about a month ago and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing this, we’re looking for a writer,’” Darabont told Cinescape in June, “and I said, ‘Yeah, George, I’m there.’ It’s the only gig I’ve taken sight unseen.” As for the story, he went on, “I have no idea at this point what the movie is about. I’m putting my faith in Steven and George — I will be their writing vessel.” The same month, Ford took a more cautious stance in an interview with the same magazine. “It’s official that we have an ambition to make the film,” he said, “but unless we get a script that we’re all happy with, I don’t think it’s sure that will happen. So, I’m very happy about the fact that we’ve all committed to a certain idea, and we’re developing it and hoping it will be fruitful.” Spielberg had soon confirmed to Dreamwatch magazine that Darabont had commenced work on the screenplay, based on a “wonderful” story by Lucas, who told the official Star Wars website, starwars.com, how excited he was to revisit a character he created a generation ago. “Steven, Harrison and I have wanted to do this for some time, and this feels like the right moment.”

2003 heralded further Indy IV news, as Spielberg confirmed that Sean Connery — who was then busy playing Allan Quatermain, one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones, in Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — would return as Henry Jones Sr. “Indy’s pop will be back for a few scenes,” he said, “and it’s set in the early 1950s. Harrison is going to be sixty-two years old when the film [begins production], so we had to push the years into the 1950s. I’d like to get Karen Allen back for one soundbite,” he added, referring to the actress who played Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark; yet plans to bring back Kate Capshaw appeared to have been derailed by Darabont. “He called me and said, ‘I’m not sure we can work her into the script, too,’” Spielberg said.

Darabont had other ideas about the direction the script should take. “I absolutely don’t want to do things like having him say, ‘I’m getting too old for this shit,’” he told the Alameda Times-Star Online. “I don’t want to be slipping and sliding in clichès. The character is no longer in the 1930s. He has to age honestly. He’s got to be in the 1950s.” Describing the process of working on the script as “a total blast,” he added: “Let’s face it, what’s not to like about Indiana Jones? I saw the first movie in 1981, five years before I started my writing career. Who knew I would grow up to write the sequel?”

Darabont’s script, entitled Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods, opens in 1952 with the hot rods racing in the Nevada desert, and Indy’s betrayal by an old friend — here, a Russian named Yuri Makovsky, rather than a Brit named Mac, who is on the trail of plutonium, rather than mummified alien remains. Instead of being captured by Russians infiltrating a U.S. military base at Area 51, Indy sneaks into the base (a scene reminiscent of the 1998 PlayStation game Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft), where he discovers the “huge cavern filled with...well, everything. It’s a maze of gantries, catwalks, experimental arcana, machinery, and mountains of crates marked ‘Top Secret.’”

The next several scenes closely mimic those from the final film: a Jeep chase through the cavernous hangar, narrowly avoiding the blasts of flame from experimental jet engines, Indy and Yuri propelled across the desert on a rocket sled. Indy is captured by the Russians, thrown in the trunk of a car, driven to a fake town constructed as part of an A-Bomb test, where he survives the blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator. After a radiation scrub and debriefing, Indy is accused of selling secrets to the Russians, put on a leave of absence from the university where he has tenure, gets drunk and bewails his lot to the statue of Marcus Brody, before visiting a display case containing, among other artefacts, the Cross of Coronado from Last Crusade and the fertility goddess from Raiders.

Here, he is attacked by a ‘Thin Man’ whom Darabont describes as “Death in a homburg hat. Dressed all in black. Rat-thin face with a long scar bisecting a milky dead eye.” The Thin Man shoots the FBI agent tailing Indy, and when he falls to his death during the ensuing fistfight with Indy, leaves behind the key to a left luggage locker at Grand Central Station — and a lot of questions. Later, as Indy packs a suitcase, he is scolded by his father, not only for getting drunk, but for running away. “It appears there’s a reason you’re named after the dog,” he quips, a reference to the origin of the ‘Indiana’ nickname.

The left luggage locker leads Indy to a disheveled hotel room, and a bowling ball bag containing a (human) crystal skull. “Perfectly formed, life-sized, smoother than glass, kicking light like a giant diamond orb,” it is the ‘Skull of Destiny.’ Moments later, a gangster named Reggie Nalder, mistaking him for Yuri, hands Indy a passport, some cash — and a plane ticket to Peru. As Reggie pays the price for his incompetence, Indy makes his way to a Peruvian backwater named Madre de Dios, where he is surprised to find his (Yuri’s) contact is none other than Marion Ravenwood, who he hasn’t seen for twelve years — and who greets him with a punch in the mouth. “I told you if I ever saw your face again I’d pop you one!” she says, before demanding that he hands over the crystal skull.

Marion convinces Indy to accompany her — and her husband, handsome Hungarian explorer Baron Peter Belasko — on an expedition to La Ciudad de Los Dioses, the fabled ‘Lost City of the Gods, which Professor Vernon Oxley, an old friend of Indy’s father, was trying to find when he disappeared without a trace three years earlier. According to Marion, one of Oxley’s retainers survived, crawling out of the jungle having found the crystal skull — but lost his mind. Together, they figure out the legend: “There are thirteen skulls in all, fashioned by the gods as they lay dying,” Indy explains. “When all the skulls are brought together again, the gods will be reborn and reward mankind with all the knowledge of the universe.”

Flying over the famous Nazca lines, which Oxley believed to be a map showing the way to the lost city, Indy and Marion are shot at by a biplane bearing Yuri, leading to a barnstorming aerial dogfight, a good old-fashioned ‘wing walk’ by Marion, and a crash-landing in the Amazon rain forest. Yuri continues to stalk the team as they survive such hazards as poisonous frogs, mutated bugs, the local despot’s armed goons, Yuri’s Zhukov commandos, rapids, waterfalls, a giant snake that swallows Indy, hat and all — and Marion’s husband, who, it transpires, is working for the Russians, who seek to harness the skulls’ psychic powers to use as a weapon in the Cold War.

Arriving at the fabled City, they discover huge water wheels, fifty feet in diameter, being spun by the rapids, acting as gigantic turbines in a ten thousand year old electrical generating station! Deep in the bowels of the ancient machine, Indy & Co stumble on the chamber which collects the relics of lost civilizations, and the throne room with thirteen (rather than just one) headless crystal skeletons. When Indy replaces one of the skulls, the creatures speaks through Oxley: “We are the ones who fell from the heavens,” the alien voice explains. “We are the Nephalim. We are the Rubezahl. We are the lights in the sky.” With echoes of von Däniken, StarGate and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the voice goes on to explain that they nurtured, enhanced and advanced the human race thousands of years ago, and were worshipped as gods. Now restored to their former glory, the aliens take off in a huge flying saucer — which then crash lands, exploding with the force of a nuclear blast, destroying the Lost City of the Gods forever. Indy winds up marrying the newly divorced Marion, at a ceremony attended by Professor Oxley, Henry Jones Sr, Sallah, and President Eisenhower himself.[1]

While Lucas, Spielberg and Ford considered Darabont’s draft, delivered on 4 October 2003, the appetite for a fourth Indiana Jones was further whetted by the DVD debut of the original trilogy, previously available only on video and laserdisc. While fans reveled in the copious bonus features on the new DVDs, Spielberg and Ford both reacted enthusiastically to Darabont’s script. Lucas, however, did not. “It was a tremendous disappointment and a waste of a year,” Darabont later told MTV. “I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I, and he, felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn’t like the script.” A despairing Darabont confronted Lucas directly. “I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You have a fantastic script. I think you’re insane, George.’ You can say things like that to George, and he doesn’t even blink. He’s one of the most stubborn men I know.”

With Darabont out of the picture, Spielberg suggested bringing in screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, who had worked uncredited on the Spielberg-produced smash hit Twister, and scripted two of the director’s films, Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. “He put some really good ideas together, and gave us some guidance and direction, especially on the story.” Sidestepping the writers who had come and gone in between, Spielberg added: “What I did later on was I went to what I call my ‘closer’, David Koepp, who has written a number of films [for me], starting with Jurassic Park and The Lost World, including War of the Worlds. And then he wrote the script that became the movie.” Elements apparently introduced in Koepp’s draft included Indy’s son,[2] Irina Spalko, ‘Mac’, the attack by poisonous ants, sword fights, and the DUKW/’duck’ chase. “I spent about a year on it, first doing drafts with Steven and then doing drafts with Steven and George,” Koepp said later. “It was a lot of fun. The first thing is that you realize this is a beloved character, probably one of the most [beloved] in film history, and a lot of people are going to be angry no matter what you do.”

He was right. Directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas from a story by Lucas and a script credited solely to David Koepp, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released on 22 May 2008 to widespread, but not quite universal, critical derision — so much, in fact, that the phrase “nuking the fridge” temporarily supplanted the Happy Days-inspired “jumping the shark” as a pop culture term for the decline of a once-proud and much-loved property into absurdity. Actor Shia LaBoeuf, who played Indy’s son Mutt, joined the ranks of declaimers. “I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished,” he said in 2010, adding that Harrison Ford agreed. “We had major discussions. He wasn’t happy with it either.”

If so, Ford had no one to blame but himself. After all, he was the one who had been cracking the whip. “I was the hold out, the one who said, ‘I’m done with this series, it was great, let’s walk away,’” said Spielberg. “I have to give the credit to Harrison for starting the ball rolling. He got very proactive with both George and [me] and said, ‘I want to play Indy one more time.’ So he started this. Blame him.”

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1 Speaking of weddings, Darabont throws in a neat in-joke, as Marion asks Indy what ever became of nightclub singer Willie Scott, played in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom by Kate Capshaw. “Last I heard, she fell in love and married some bigshot director,” Indy responds, a reference to Capshaw’s marriage to Spielberg.

2 According to Lucas, Indy’s son was originally conceived as a daughter. “Steven didn’t like that idea so David revisited the idea again as a son, and this time Steven said ‘Okay.’ In the beginning, it was approached that he was kind of a nerd,” Lucas added, “a strait-laced kid who wore suits. And then later on we decided that isn’t really the way it should work. The way it should work is that he is sort of the wild kid, which is the way Indy was to his father.”

THE LOST CRUSADE

Despite an epic crusade by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it would take a miracle to bring Crusade to the screen

“The story of the Crusades is the murderous attack of the Christians on the Arabs and the Jews. Do you think that’s a politically interesting situation?”

— director Paul Verhoeven, circa 2002

The era of the Crusades was one of the richest, bloodiest and most controversial in history. Small wonder, then, that Hollywood has found it almost as suitable for frequent visitation as the Roman era. The road to the Crusades began on 27 November 1095 in Clermont, France, where a polemical proclamation by Pope Urban II, describing in lurid detail Turkish attacks upon the Christian Byzantine Empire, set in motion what was to become the First Crusade. Soldiers, clergy and commoners alike travelled to the East to wage war on Muslims, and although payment would be scarce and conditions were likely to be harsh, Pope Urban offered a ‘Papal Indulgence’, which promised anyone taking part in the enterprise the immediate remission of all sins. By the middle of the following year, tens of thousands of Christians were on their way to Byzantium, attacking Muslims (whom they viewed as ignorant heathens) and Jews (judged ‘Christ-killers’) with equal relish.

Although thousands of civilians joined the Crusaders, the ‘official’ armies were comprised of three groups: one led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh, Count of Vermandois and Robert, Duke of Normandy; another led by Raymond IV of St Gilles; and a third under the command of the Norman warlord Bohemond. The armies’ spiritual leader was Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy, a close confidant of Pope Urban II. Joining forces in Byzantium in early 1097, they set about recapturing the city of Nicaea from the Turks, before dividing into two groups en route to Antioch, after which they staved off a Muslim ambush and put the Turks to flight, almost starved to death in Anatolia and, in October 1097, lay siege to Antioch — a seemingly impregnable city which was so large it was impossible to surround. The siege dragged on through the winter and into 1098, and the Crusaders, deep in hostile territory, quickly ran short of food. Many died of starvation and disease (including Bishop Adhémar), and many more went home, but ultimately the Crusaders were victorious. Under the command of Raymond of St Gilles, early in 1099 they set out for Jerusalem, by that time a heavily fortified garrison of Arab and Nubian troops, where another siege took place. In order to break the siege, forces led by Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Normandy breached the city wall in the dead of night — and rampaged through the streets, slaughtering everyone in their path...

Nine hundred years after the First Crusade, another began: a campaign by Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Paul Verhoeven, collaborators on the worldwide sci-fi hit Total Recall, to make an epic movie set during this bloody chapter of history. Part Spartacus, part Conan the Barbarian, Crusade was to star Schwarzenegger, then the world’s biggest box office star, as Hagen, a thief-turned-slave who winds up joining the Christian army to free Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1095, only to discover that each of the rival faiths have more than religious reasons for waging holy war. As Verhoeven recalls of the project’s origins: “We were sitting outside Arnold’s trailer in Mexico City at Churubusco Studios, while we were shooting Total Recall, and he started to talk about a script he had once read about the Crusades. He said it wasn’t a good script, but he really liked the idea so much, to make a movie about the Crusades. And it was also one of my favourite times in history.” Verhoeven had read a great deal about the period while still living in Holland, and even though he had discussed the possibility of a film with his regular screenwriting collaborator, Gerard Soeteman, he did not think they would ever get such a project financed. “But then, when Arnold mentioned it, I said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting, I think I know exactly who the writer for that would be,’ because by then I had met Walon Green.”

Born in Baltimore in 1936, Green had begun his screenwriting career as co-writer (with director Sam Peckinpah) on the bloodthirsty western The Wild Bunch. His first collaboration with Verhoeven was an unrealised adaptation of Women by Charles Bukowski; this was followed by a script for what became Disney’s Dinosaur, which Verhoeven originally planned to direct using a combination of Phil Tippett’s ‘stop motion’ effects and Dennis Muren’s CGI. Says Verhoeven, “I thought Walon was a great writer, and I got along with him very very well. He reminded me of my Dutch screenwriter, Gerard Soeteman, in that he’s very well read, and he knows a lot about politics and history, and he has a good take on the politics of the Crusades. He seemed to be the perfect candidate for Crusade. When I discussed it with Walon,” he adds, “he was immediately enthusiastic.” Mario Kassar and Andrew G Vajna, whose Carolco pictures had bankrolled Total Recall, paid Green to develop a script, which they hoped would reunite their two biggest stars, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, for a profitable venture into history.

Green’s first draft of Crusade opens in France as Hagen, a cynical thief in the employ of Count Emmich of Bascarat, is caught robbing an abbey, and brought before the Abbot. Sentenced to hang, he finds himself in jail with a Jewish snake oil salesman named Aron (‘Ari’), also sentenced to hang for using the occasion of a visit by Pope Urban II to sell fake cure-alls to the locals. Ari explains that Hagen’s booty of gold and silver is all very well, but religious artefacts — the tooth of a saint, the finger-bone of John the Baptist, a fragment of the holy cross — are where the ‘real’ money is. Upon hearing that the Pope is always on the lookout for signs from God, Hagen burns a huge cross into his back, thereby tricking the holy fools (including Bishop Adhémar, the Crusade’s spiritual leader) into thinking it is a stigmata-like symbol of his piety, and so engineering his emancipation. (This scene may have been inspired by the ‘miracle of the lance’: Provençal peasant Peter Bartholomew, claiming to have had a vision of Christ and St Andrew in which they told him that the lance used to pierce Christ’s side was buried beneath the high altar of St Peter’s Church, was allowed to supervise the digging, and the lance was duly found. Although the crusading army’s leaders were sceptical that a miracle had occurred, many of the Crusaders were convinced, and they took advantage of the boost in morale to launch a last-ditch attempt to break the siege of Antioch.)

Released from his bonds, and with Ari in tow, Hagen is dispatched to the Holy Land, where his first action is to rescue a Jewish wedding party from a merciless attack led by Emmich. “We wanted to be honest to history, and as close to what we think happened at that time, and were the motives of the time,” says Verhoeven. “And also to point out that the Crusades started out with persecuting the Jews. The moment they [the Crusaders] go on the road, they think, ‘These are the killers of God, the theocides, so let’s kill them first.’ That was all acknowledged in the script.” Emmich responds to Hagen’s interference by challenging him to a duel in which Emmich is defeated, and scarred for life. Adding insult to injury, Robert, Duke of Normandy, punishes Emmich for his unprovoked attack, and rewards Hagen for his heroics by inviting him to march in his command. Emmich, vowing vengeance, sells Hagen into slavery in Jaffa, where he is rescued from a eunuch’s fate by Ari, now posing as a Muslim in the service of local Emir Ibn Khaldun, commander of Jerusalem’s forces. The Emir, meanwhile, is trying to marry his beautiful daughter Leila to a Muslim fundamentalist, Djarvat, whose army her father is eager to use to bolster his own. Although she and Hagen have a growing attraction — albeit from a distance both physical and social — and she is suspicious of Djarvat’s motives, Leila agrees to go along with the arranged marriage.

When Djarvat’s true nature as a bloodthirsty warmonger is revealed, Ibn Khaldun calls off the wedding, but Djarvat kidnaps Leila and demands the Emir’s obeisance in return for his daughter’s life. Hagen manages to rescue Leila, but after they consummate their relationship, she is captured again, this time by Emmich. Emmich is about to rape her when the alarm is sounded — Muslims are approaching the encampment under a flag of truce, and ‘Hagen of the Miraculous Cross’ is with them! Ibn Khaldun offers peace in return for his daughter, and a truce is agreed between the Muslims and Christians. Having brokered Leila’s rescue, Hagen then feels betrayed when Ibn Khaldun sends her away and, following Emmich’s murder of Ibn Khaldun, he finds himself on the side of the Crusaders in the subsequent battle.

When the Christians are victorious, the defeated Djarvat offers Emmich a deal: he will allow Emmich to acquire the holiest relic of all — a fragment of the cross on which Christ was crucified — if he is spared and allowed to control the Muslims who survive the slaughter to come. Emmich agrees, on one condition: he wants Leila too, “to wed and bed the true love of Hagen of the cross while he watches and dies.” Djarvat’s attempt to kidnap Leila is frustrated by Hagen and Ari, but the sepulchre containing the Holy Cross is set on fire — and only Hagen can save it. Hagen rushes in, and emerges from the smoke and flames carrying the cross on his back — a spectacle which brings his destiny full circle, and has Emmich’s men falling to their knees. Hagen seizes the chance to kill Emmich, and escape with the holiest of relics and his beloved Leila. At the end, disgusted by the death and destruction unleashed in the name of one god or another, Hagen turns his back on the Crusaders, and places the true cross in the hands of monks who vow never to reveal its location. According to a closing caption, it has never been found.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, coming as it does from the co-writer of The Wild Bunch, the script is as bloodthirsty as it is scatological. At one point, Hagen is bound, sewn into the rotting carcass of a donkey and set upon by hungry hyenas. He narrowly escapes the fate of a eunuch — namely, having his genitalia cleanly severed, the wound cauterised and compressed with a mixture of tar and fresh cow dung. An enemy is killed by having a trident thrown through his face. In a climactic scene, Emmich is severed in two by Hagen’s sword, his legs and lower body remaining on his fleeing horse while his upper body falls to the ground. It’s hardly PG-rated stuff. Blood and guts, carnage and chaos are seldom far from the screen, a tendency which might have phased lesser filmmakers, but not the taboo-breaking, envelope-pushing director of such ultra-violent films as Robocop and Total Recall, who later courted a different kind of controversy with Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

“There are touches of lightness and romanticism and there are often funny scenes,” Verhoeven says of Crusade, “but it’s not a happy story. It’s cruel and it’s violent — my kind of ultra-violence that I’ve displayed in many movies — but there is also a lightness and tenderness, and I think with Arnold it would have worked for an audience. And the fact that it wasn’t made had nothing to do with the disbelief of the producer or anyone else that this movie, with Arnold as a Crusader and an honest political touch, would not reach its audience — we all felt that we would.”

The political viewpoint of Green’s script was certainly intriguing, if not groundbreaking. Although it does not contextualise the period in historical or epochal terms — it does not, for instance, open with a caption explaining what the Crusades were all about — there are political elements to both the story and the characters. The fictional Emmich and his cousin Waldemar are corrupt opportunists, using a Papally-sanctioned religious crusade as an excuse to rape and pillage — vividly illustrated by the attack on the Jewish wedding party, launched on the pretext of having them contribute to the war effort. Pope Urban II, for his part, seems more concerned with the geographic incursions made by the Muslim Empire than the souls lost to Islam as a result. Robert of Flanders, commander of the Papal guard, is nobler, decreeing that pillage or violence against any but the enemy will be punishable by death. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the knights leading the Crusade, is as noble as his counterpart Ibn Khaldun, who believes that Christians, Jews and Muslims are fundamentally the same, and hopes that peace may be forged between the disparate religions. Khaldun’s new ally, Djarvat, seeks no such accord; he wishes to drive the infidels from the Holy Land as surely as the Crusaders wish to wipe worshippers of Allah from the face of the Earth with the rallying cry of “Convert or die!”

“It was always supposed to be a movie for Arnold,” says Verhoeven, “so we were all very much aware what kind of movie we had to make. I knew it would have a certain grandeur, also perhaps a little bit of hyper-reality, but on the other hand we wanted to have the historical events be completely correct, and the political point of view — the evil side of the Crusades, which is undoubtedly there. We wanted to make clear that this was not a great endeavour; that it was all cheating by the Pope, who basically lured all these fighting nobles from France so they could die somewhere else, instead of having trouble with them! That’s what most historians think about Urban II. On the other hand, there was this idiotic thinking in Christian religion that Jerusalem should be in Christian hands, for some unclear reason. Even today people think the city should be part of Christianity — [a view] still subsidised by a lot of fundamentalists in the United States.” Before the Crusades, he adds, there was no persecution based on religion in Jerusalem: “Arabs, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Jewry were all accepted. There was just this evil thought of the Church that because Jesus had lived there, or spent a couple of weeks there, and got killed, that this belonged to Christianity — an even more absurd claim than saying that God promised it to the Jewish population. But as Gore Vidal pointed out, ‘God is not a real estate dealer’.”

Despite the script’s obvious strengths, Verhoeven was not entirely satisfied with the early drafts, and Total Recall co-writer Gary Goldman was called in to rework it. “They came up with a draft or two, and for some reason Paul wasn’t excited about it,” says Goldman. “I think he more or less decided there was something wrong with it, or it wasn’t good enough for him to be ready to make, so he kind of lost interest in it. He showed it to me at around that time and I remember thinking it was very good, and I told him so, and he thought I was an idiot for liking it.” Goldman describes Green’s draft as “a picaresque tale about a roguish serf who gets caught stealing, and the only we to get out of being hanged is to fake a miracle. He cynically endorses the Crusade, and shows the venality of all the European lords who were jockeying for power. It was a very good screenplay,” he adds. “He has a wonderful feeling for period. It was well written; filled with wonderful ideas. It was a great story, and very cynical — a serious historical epic tailored to Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Moreover, Goldman believes it was a subversive script, hiding an intelligent film in the guise of an action movie, allowing Verhoeven to have his cake and eat it — a trick they had already pulled off with Total Recall, in which the audience gets to enjoy an action-packed Arnie movie despite the fact that it takes place almost entirely inside the putative hero’s head. “We presented it in the way of Total Recall,” Verhoeven confirms, “so you can be looking at this movie completely in a non-involved way, just Arnold and adventure: he gets caged, he nearly gets castrated, he finds a girl — this beautiful Arab princess — and he has to kill the bad guys, and then he decides that the best part of life would be to be on his farm with his Arab wife. You could see it on that level. But there were also these other levels: the anti-Semitism, the anti-Arab thinking, prejudices left and right.

“You could say the movie was also pro-Arab, or certainly not anti-Arab — there are bad Christians and good Christians, bad Arabs and good Arabs, but most of the Arabs seem to be okay, so it doesn’t fit into this [attitude of] looking at Arabs as evil people. It wasn’t the Arabs that persecuted the Jews, it was the Christians, with a couple of thousand years of anti-Semitic thinking. In the year 1000 this was common thinking. Even the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, are permeated by anti-Semitic thinking. So I think we wanted to express that without hitting it hard.” Goldman recalls that the script was an indictment of the Crusades specifically, but, more generally “it was an anti-war statement, basically saying that the Christians had no business going there. That’s not how Hollywood would do it,” he concludes, “but at Carolco we were free to do what we wanted.” Verhoeven, for his part, wanted to do for the Crusades what Oliver Stone, among others, had done for Vietnam, and revisionist Westerns had done for the ignoble conquest of the American West. “If you see other movies about the Crusades,” he explains, “Christianity is saving the world in Jerusalem, and there is this absolute claim of Christianity that that city should be their property. So for the last four hundred years they have desperately tried to get it, and [they believe] that if it’s not to be in Christian hands, at least it has to be fully in Jewish hands.”

Not being the kind of writer to throw out the baby with the bathwater – even though it may result in the Writers Guild of America awarding a larger share of the writing credit, and thus residual payments – Goldman’s final rewrite did not differ significantly from Green’s. “We tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until we finally got it to the point where Paul was very happy with it, and they were ready to go ahead and make it,” the writer explains. “Some of it was that after trying things and trying things, Paul started to realise how good the Walon draft really was, so he kept the changes that were improvements and got rid of the ones that weren’t, pieced together the best parts of each draft, and we ended up with a draft that he was ready to make. I was very excited about it. Walon Green was also very happy with it. He thought the best parts of all his drafts had been chosen all along, which was Paul’s doing. Your horror as a writer, or your fear, is that someone’s going to ruin your work, but I’ve always been a very respectful rewriter, and Paul really is a creative rewriter-developer. He’s not into starting over.”

One of the more fundamental changes has Hagen and Emmich re-imagined as half-brothers, with the latter as the true heir of a Count, and Hagen as the illegitimate son of the same father (shades of Gloucester’s sons in King Lear). Not only does this add a suitably Biblical sibling rivalry to the relationship, but the Abbot who catches Hagen stealing also uses it to his own advantage: because he knows Hagen is legally entitled to half the estate of Emmich’s father, he agrees to sentence Hagen to death only if Emmich signs a quarter of his estate over to the Abbot. Goldman tones down the attack on the Jewish wedding party so that it is disrupted, not decimated, and Hagen saves the bride from being raped by Emmich and his men, rather than intervening too late.

Leila is also given something of a makeover. Instead of agreeing to the arranged marriage with a Muslim noble (named Duqaq in Goldman’s versions — though in reality ‘Duqaq’ is a rank, not a name — and with Djarvat demoted to a relatively minor presence), she rejects his proposal, forcing Duqaq to resort to nefarious means to ensnare the woman he loves. Furthermore, in Goldman’s version, Ibn Khaldun promises his daughter that in marriage her will is to be her own, to which Djarvat retorts that no woman’s will is her own – and further twists the situation to his advantage by suggesting that their faith faces desecration because of a woman’s pride. Another key device in Goldman’s revisions is that it is Hagen who attempts to broker the peace accord between the Christians and the Muslims, only to have Djarvat’s soldiers attack — thus, it appears that Hagen led the Christians into a trap.

Goldman’s greatest addition to the script is the spectacular ‘Shadow Warrior’ sequence, perhaps the most memorable scene in the entire 132-page enterprise. As Goldman envisaged it, in the middle of the climactic battle between the Crusader army and Djarvat’s Muslim horde, the setting sun projects a gigantic image of Hagen on horseback onto a wall of smoke, throwing the Muslims into a panic and inspiring the Crusader army to victory. The effect is increased when Hagen throws a sword at a Saracen horseman, who keels over dead with the sword arcing straight up like a triumphant cross, surrounded by a mystical aureole of sunlight. From this point, the battle becomes a slaughter, with even Ibn Khaldun — who survives far longer in Goldman’s drafts — falling to Emmich, who drives his men to attack even as the Saracens lower their colours and attempt to surrender. As the surviving Muslims retreat to relative safety within the walls of Jerusalem, the Crusaders lay siege to the city, killing Jews and Muslims with equal vehemence. At the end, Hagen and Leila walk off into the sunset, leaving Ari to ponder which of the three religious faiths he will adopt this week, and the Crusaders to wonder where the true cross is hidden.

Appraising the draft dated 24 January 1993 for the Ain’t It Cool website, reviewer ‘Damien Thorn’ described it as “the greatest unproduced script of the decade... a brutal action epic laced with literate political dialogue and evil humour (what you’d expect for a slicing cavalier Paul Verhoeven flick), this is foremost a smashingly entertaining story that hurtles forward like all those severed limbs in Starship Troopers. Green is known for his ruthless sense of structure and here every scene is loaded with fascinating details that set up the following events with enormous payoff. The Arnold character, Hagen, is the ultimate part for him — iconic and shrouded in charismatic mystery that reveals a keen intelligence and the sort of presence you can believe would be at the center of an epic shite storm in the medieval Christian world.”

Thorn also pointed to a few problems — some “ordinary” action sequences, and a third act which was somewhat “perfunctory”. He felt that the script might benefit from more political scenes, à la Ben Hur or Spartacus, and a punchier ending, but concluded that with its play on church politics, mass schizophrenia and sense of entire civilizations out to exterminate each other, it was a worthy and timely event film, “Verhoeven’s answer to Alexander Nevsky, Lawrence of Arabia”. It might not make back its production cost, and would, he felt, certainly antagonise “every known special interest group on the planet,” but was nevertheless the film that Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven “were born to make.” Another Ain’t It Cool script reviewer thought the draft somewhat muddled. “Crusade doesn’t want to take a religious stand, although it does seem to indicate at one point that Hagen has had a Christian vision,” the anonymous poster opined. “The result is that we watch three religiously-motivated armies (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) fight over Jerusalem and its Holy Shrine, and we don’t really care about any of them. Truth be told, I found the character of Ari (Hagen’s little con man sidekick) far more interesting and complex. It’s all terribly violent, even for Verhoeven,” the unnamed critic concluded, “but at least there’s a creative escape from prison.”

Carolco put the film into pre-production in early 1993, with Schwarzenegger being joined by Robert Duvall as Adhémar of Le Puy, John Turturro (though some sources say his brother, Nicholas) as Ari, Christopher McDonald (Thelma and Louise) as the evil Emmich. Verhoeven recalls screen testing a number of actresses for the role of Leila, before finally deciding upon Jennifer Connelly, a future Academy Award winner for A Beautiful Mind. “I only knew Jennifer from this Disney movie where she flies [The Rocketeer], but since then I have asked her several times for other movies — Starship Troopers and Hollow Man — but she felt they were not good enough, or not her kind of movie.” With shooting scheduled to begin in the summer of 1994, however, Carolco began to feel the aftershocks of its production profligacy, with expensive misfires such as Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin presaging a general downturn in the company’s fortunes, despite the strong box office performance of such high-profile pictures as Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

“We couldn’t quite figure out where the money went,” says Goldman, “but by that time it had gone. Crusade was a giant movie, and the company didn’t trust the numbers that were being thrown around. They felt that the movie was going to end up costing a lot more than Paul and [producer] Alan Marshall said — which is odd because Paul and Alan are probably the two least political film-makers on that level. Paul is ideologically honest; he takes pride in defining himself as a person who will give you the brutal truth, and expect you to handle it. So he doesn’t really lie about budgeting, which is a mistake because there’s no way to get these movies made without lying. People won’t ever admit up front that they’re willing to make the movie for that amount — you have to get them slightly pregnant, or they’ll never have the guts to bite, because they’ll be held accountable on these decisions.”

Verhoeven, who holds a PhD in mathematics, agrees. “I was too honest. I was stupid. I should have said that we could do it for a hundred million. We started out with seventy-five or eighty or something, but we didn’t really get the budget lower than ninety-five or a hundred because it was too complex.” As a result, Carolco began to lose confidence that it could be brought in on budget, and despite the millions of dollars spent getting to this point — including a ‘pay or play’ deal with Schwarzenegger, which meant that he was owed his full salary whether the movie was made or not — the film was scrapped at the eleventh hour. “We were already building [sets] in Spain,” says Verhoeven. “We had to break it all off, and the whole pre-production cost of the not-made movie was about $10 million. Despite the hefty write-down, Carolco’s backers likely saw it as a saving of $90 million – possibly more.

“Carolco went through a terrible time,” Verhoeven recalls. “They had two big movies in development at the same time,” referring to Crusade and Cutthroat Island, the pirate epic which ultimately sank the company in a sea of red ink. “Ultimately they realised that, in the circumstances they were in financially, they could not do both. In my opinion, they made the wrong choice because they thought Michael Douglas would be in Cutthroat Island, but he backed off, and instead of rotating around to Crusade, they continued along that track, and got Matthew Modine.” When Cutthroat Island flopped, Carolco went into bankruptcy, still owing Schwarzenegger his full salary for Crusade. “I think there was some anger over it,” says Goldman. “In any case, they couldn’t or didn’t pay him, but they’d had a long relationship, and to pay someone twelve or fifteen million dollars for a film they don’t make... well, it’s a lot of money.” Eventually, Schwarzenegger reached a settlement with the producers that was mutually agreeable: the actor would take over all rights to the screenplay of Crusade, without any of the negative costs accrued against it, in return for forfeiting his payday.

Free to shop the script around, Schwarzenegger was soon developing it through his company, Oak Productions, hoping that Verhoeven would remain on board as he tried to set it up at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures, where the actor had made Last Action Hero. Unfortunately, rather than being the biggest hit of 1993 as expected, Last Action Hero grossed just $50 million in the US, leading to Mark Canton’s exit from the studio and a cool reception to the actor’s Crusade project. Although True Lies (1994) recovered some of Schwarzenegger’s box office clout, it was followed by a string of under-performers, including Junior, Eraser (written by Walon Green), Batman & Robin and End of Days, temporarily arresting the rise of the Schwarzenegger machine. Meanwhile, Verhoeven was busy making another costly flop, Showgirls, followed by Starship Troopers, neither of which repeated the success of his earlier Hollywood films. As Goldman explains, “All of a sudden neither of them were that ‘hot’ — and it just isn’t possible to make a movie of that size with people who aren’t hot, because it wasn’t an obviously commercial idea anyway.”

Another factor working against the film was the fact that, at the time, the historical epic was a moribund genre; rather than reviving it, Braveheart (1995) was seen as the exception that proved the rule. Nevertheless, in February 1999, Variety announced that Schwarzenegger was in “serious talks” to revive Crusade with producer-financier Arnon Milchan – the man behind such hits as Pretty Woman, Under Siege, Falling Down, LA Confidential and some fifty other films – under his company’s deal with 20th Century Fox. “Long considered one of the best unproduced scripts of recent years,” Variety noted, “the Walon Green-penned Crusade has a fascinating history that ended up with Schwarzenegger himself owning the project. Schwarzenegger long has been expected to play the hero, Hagen, a reluctant warrior who begins the film as a prisoner set to die... It’s unclear who Schwarzenegger and Milchan would choose to direct,” the report went on, “though Paul Verhoeven is interested, five years after he nearly directed Schwarzenegger when the film was to be financed by Carolco.” A year later, during publicity duties for The 6th Day, Schwarzenegger confirmed that Crusade was still in active development, and that he hoped Verhoeven — then busy making Hollow Man — might shoot it sometime in 2001.

Then came the events of September 11: an attack by Islamic fundamentalists against a Judeo-Christian economic stronghold, to which the US government reacted by targeting two Islamic nations with spurious links to the attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq. As Verhoeven pointed out to DVD Monthly, “Even the word ‘crusade’, which was used by George W. Bush in the beginning... when he said, ‘This is a crusade against terrorism.’ He had to take the word ‘crusade’ out of the speeches, because [the Arabs remembered it] and the slaughterhouse that the Crusades were. Of course,” he adds, “Bush, not knowing what happened in the year 1100, thought the Crusades were something great, and that’s why he used it at the beginning of his campaign. But somebody in the government, to my great astonishment, knew a little bit more and decided that it wasn’t the greatest way to approach the Arab world.” Nevertheless, in November 2001, the staunchly Republican Schwarzenegger told Cinescape’s Beth Laski that he was still pursuing the project: “We have to bring it up to date, which means rewriting and then finding the right studio, someone who believes in it. We’re negotiating with Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer,” he added, “and we’re very well on our way.”

In some ways, the post-9/11 period was both the best of times and the worst of times to make Crusade. On the one hand, with the world’s largest Christian nation (America) waging war in, or on, some of the smaller Islamic countries (Afghanistan, Iraq), warnings of insensitivity may be valid. On the other hand, what better time for an intellectual, politically astute filmmaker to bring to an audience the idea that there is a millennium-old precedent for the ongoing strife in the Middle East, and that then, as now, there are political and economical reasons behind the slaughter, rather than fundamental religious ones? Indeed, in a February 2002 story entitled ‘Now Showing: The Flag’ and subtitled ‘Hollywood is Storming Out of its 9-11 Foxhole with a Barrage of Patriotic Flicks’, The Washington Post reported that studio head-turned-independent producer Mike Medavoy — who produced Schwarzenegger’s The 6th Day — had optioned the rights to Warriors of God, James Reston Jr’s book about the Third Crusade, in which the principal characters are the Christian warrior-king Richard the Lion-Hearted and his noble Muslim nemesis, Saladin.

“At its core, it hearkens to what’s going on today,” Medavoy commented. Reading the book, he said, “it’s like the light bulb goes off and you go, ‘Wow, here’s an interesting approach to what’s going on in the world, but at a different time.’ How similar things are. And it’s about humanity, about how human beings can help each other.” The same article noted that even Crusade might be revived as a direct result of the current climate. “In the end, you see the stupidity of the Crusades,” original Crusade screenwriter Walon Green was quoted as saying. “The theme is about the danger and amorality of war anytime you attach a holy aspect to it.” Thus, he added, “It’s absolutely the right subject for now.” Verhoeven agreed. “The story of the Crusades is the murderous attack of the Christians on the Arabs and the Jews. Do you think that’s a politically interesting situation?” Says Goldman, “[Before 9/11], the word ‘crusade’ was a dead word — it had no connotations. It was a historical period that had no relevance. Now the Crusades are incredibly relevant.”

Certainly, 20th Century Fox seemed to think so. A month after The Washington Post’s story, Variety announced that director Ridley Scott — who had single-handedly revived the historical epic at the turn of the century, with the DreamWorks/Universal co-production Gladiator — would join forces with Fox on Kingdom of Heaven, scripted by William Monahan. “The Crusades, which began in the 11th century, will provide a highly visual canvas for a drama featuring armour-clad warriors who bore red crosses on their breastplates and battled with spears, swords and shields,” the report stated. “It’s a movie I’ve been thinking about for twenty years,” Scott told The San Bernadino County Sun. “It’s going to take place in the middle of the Crusades, around 1130, 1136, and feature Saladin, a Muslim, who was the wisest of all the knights, a trustworthy man of his word... I don’t want the movie to be about knights in armour and chaps charging around with red crosses and waving swords and hacking off heads. It really should be a fundamental discussion between the two religions and not only that, but the actual misrepresentation of the Holy Roman Empire by the Catholic Church, which was in those times seriously corrupt. When they got down there, the people the church regarded as infidels had a faith that was as strong, if not stronger, than the fundamental rules of Christianity.” Speaking at a press conference for Matchstick Men, he added: “The subject has to be dealt with in such a delicate fashion. It’s one giant misunderstanding.”

Kingdom of Heaven’s failure to repeat the critical and commercial success of Gladiator may have sounded the death knell for Schwarzenegger’s Crusades project; even in 2004, as the actor was beginning to channel his energies into his political aspirations, he was already too old to play the leading role as scripted. “Hagen is a rogue,” Goldman explains, “and you don’t have fifty-year-old rogues, you have young rogues.” Nevertheless, he adds, “Arnold’s never given up on the project.” Neither has Verhoeven, who says he’d still love to direct the film if it was ever made. “I think it’s a great script. I don’t know if Arnold wants to do it, or if he still wants to do the same part. I’ve heard rumours that he might want to change the script a little bit, because of course he’s older than that now. He might have to adapt it a little bit so he doesn’t have to play a thirty year-old. But I think that it can be adapted, and I fully agree it’s one of the greatest scripts ever written. But on the other hand the cost of a movie like that would ultimately be higher in my opinion than Terminator 3, which must have been close to the $200 million mark.”

Even with the digital multiplication used in films like Gladiator, Verhoeven doubts that the film is financially viable. “Don’t forget that Gladiator was a limited situation of gladiators in an arena,” he points out, “and here you might need a couple of thousand people to shoot it and then multiply it by ten, so that you get the twenty thousand people that there were — at least to get the feeling for the audience, because it was an enormous army. Even with digital multiplication and digital people in the background, you are still looking at a couple of hundred horses that are very difficult to digitally paint, because they’re too complex, so you have to shoot them. Even the digital shots would still be in the order of a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a couple of seconds.”

Besides, he adds, “I’m not so sure that anybody can shoot in the Arab world at the moment. It might be dangerous.”

TRAIN WRECK

Despite the best efforts of Ridley Scott, Joel Silver, Sylvester Stallone and Roland Emmerich, the ‘Alien on a train’ movie Isobar never left the station

“It was sort of like Aliens combined with Alien — a shameless rip-off.”

— ISOBAR’s second screenwriter, Steven de Souza, on early drafts

Sometime around 1987, emergent independent production company Carolco Pictures purchased a script for a futuristic science fiction/ horror hybrid described as “Alien on a train.” The script, entitled Dead Reckoning, was written ‘on spec’ by future Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls. “It was a sci-fi action thriller,” he says, “set in the future, in which an altered form of life gets loose on a high-speed runaway underground train. The creature was a humanoid with a genetically-altered brain that was intended to be used as the ‘hard drive’ in an artificial intelligence project.” The setting was near-future Los Angeles, which Uhls describes as “a traffic-infested dystopia, with wide shots of freeways and streets — even residential streets — completely jammed with non-moving, honking cars. And billboards that admonished, ‘Did you allow yourself three hours to get there?’ There was reference to a new law, just passed, outlawing horns on vehicles in LA County. The super-subway was the only viable means of transportation.” The script was bought by Carolco, with Joel Silver, producer of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard films, climbing aboard as producer.

At the time of its purchase, Carolco had yet to score big with the science fiction milestones RoboCop, Total Recall and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Nevertheless, Carolco bosses Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna saw Dead
Reckoning as the perfect vehicle for Ridley Scott. Although the Alien director had sworn off science fiction following the dismal critical reception and commercial performance of Blade Runner in 1982, his most recent films — the fantasy flop Legend and the neo-noir thriller Someone to Watch Over Me — had nudged him from Hollywood’s A-list, and he perhaps saw Dead Reckoning as a way to recapture his former glory. According to Uhls, Scott came aboard as director in 1988, accompanied by production designer Norris Spencer, with whom he would later work on Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Hannibal.

No sooner had Scott coupled himself to the project than he contacted H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist with whom he had collaborated on an aborted adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune and, more successfully, Alien, for which Giger had won a special Academy Award. “Sometime in 1988, Ridley Scott telephoned me and asked me if I would like to make a science fiction movie with him,” the artist wrote in his book Giger’s Film Designs. “For me, there is nothing greater than this. I was enthusiastic about it and immediately accepted, because a remarkable movie always originates from a director like Ridley Scott.” Scott seemed equally enthusiastic at the prospect of working with Giger again. “I have come close to working with Giger on a number of projects since we did Alien,” he commented later, “and it is my strong hope that we can work together again in bringing something special to the screen.”

At this early stage, Giger noted, there was no agreement between Scott and Carolco: “he told me to just think about the project and to capture my ideas in sketches. He would negotiate a contract with Carolco in the meantime.” Giger set to work with his customary enthusiasm, without discussing the project further with Scott or signing a contract with Carolco, producing many colour and black-and-white sketches for the project, under the new working title The Train. “If somebody is telling me something I am always so enthusiastic that I don’t wait until the contracts are done, otherwise I will lose interest,” he explains. “I have to do it when I have the spark.” Giger worked for almost nine months, between the summer of 1988 and the spring of 1989, working up numerous bizarre designs for trains, stations, passenger compartments — even a radical new kind of emergency exit in which passengers are ejected into a spontaneous ejaculation of soft foam.

During this time, Giger was frustrated by his inability to reach Scott by telephone, and unaware that the director had already moved on to direct Thelma & Louise for MGM. “Shortly thereafter he telephoned me late in the evening,” Giger recalled, “and disclosed to me that he had already gotten out of the project, three weeks before, because he would have been given too little artistic freedom.” Says Uhls, “Ridley Scott left the project, seemingly out of some disagreement with Joel Silver.” Giger continued, “He promised me that he would still negotiate with 20th Century Fox,” referring to the film’s proposed distributors, “and that if he would be able to deal with them, he would of course take me on.” As a result, he says, when the project derailed, “I never got engaged and I never got paid.” Nevertheless, Giger was able to exploit some of his unused designs for The Train when he was engaged to work on designs for ‘Sil’, the beautiful but deadly alien at the centre of the science fiction horror movie Species. “I had an idea about Sil dreaming about a ghost train,” he explains, “a train which comes and picks up people who are waiting in the station, [and who] she eats to get power. I worked on this train, and I put a lot of my own money into it,” he adds. Giger went as far as building a three-dimensional model of the train, which he filmed in action in the back garden of his home just outside Zurich.[1]

Following Scott’s departure, producer Joel Silver set about re-working the script in earnest, starting with the title: instead of Dead Reckoning, Silver preferred Isobar, defined in The Oxford Modern English Dictionary as “a line on a map connecting positions having the same atmospheric pressure at a given time, or on average over a given period.” One problem was that Isobar happened to be the title of a script which another screenwriter, Jere Cunningham, had written for Silver and fellow producers Lawrence Gordon and John Davis around 1986-1987, described by Cunningham as the story of “a mutant professional fighter in a future world, on a quest to discover the truth of his origins.” According to the writer, Arnold Schwarzenegger was interested in playing the role, but the actor’s $5 million asking price proved too rich for 20th Century Fox, and he signed to star in Total Recall instead. “A year or two later,” Cunningham reveals, “Joel Silver called and said he wanted to use my title for another project because he loved the word ‘isobar’. I said, ‘Whatever, Joel, it’s cool.’” Explains Uhls, “He wanted the name, so it had to be made to work.” Uhls dutifully came up with an explanation for the title with an acronym — Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway. “It was basically a magnetic levitation train underground that was a subway connecting the entire world,” he explains, “travelling as fast as a commercial jet plane, in a vacuum.”[2]

The new version of the script was set in a more distant future, with the surface of the Earth rendered uninhabitable. “The creature was changed to be an evolutionary leap,” Uhls recalls. “A super-adaptive humanoid that was caught thriving outside, in the environment that’s hostile to humans. It is put onto the train to be transported to a special lab. It breaks free, then it must adapt faster and more dramatically to stay alive inside the train. It requires massive doses of adrenaline to do this, so it kills people to get it.”

Uhls continued to work with Silver as German-born director Roland Emmerich and his producing partner Dean Devlin came on board. “I had worked with Roland on Moon 44,” the producer says, referring to Emmerich’s first science fiction film, “and based on that movie, Mario Kassar brought Roland in to direct the picture. Roland came in, read the script, and wanted to do a major rewrite, and asked me if I’d rewrite it. So I said, ‘Sure.’” While Devlin worked on his draft, he and Emmerich were surprised to learn that Joel Silver had hired another screenwriter. “Roland and I read in the paper that Joel Silver had hired Steven de Souza to do a rewrite, and Roland said, ‘Well, you’re about to get a new draft in two weeks, why are you hiring someone else?’ And Joel said, ‘Oh, Steven did Die Hard with me, he’s the best writer in Hollywood — trust me.’ So they never read my draft, they waited for Steven’s draft, and when that came out, Roland said to Joel, ‘I don’t want to do that, but I’ll do Dean’s draft,’ and Joel said no, so Roland baled out of the project.”

At the time, Emmerich and Devlin were some years away from delivering their science fiction blockbusters, Stargate and Independence Day, and Silver evidently had no qualms picking de Souza, the writer of Die Hard, 48HRS and The Running Man, over two relative unknowns. Says Devlin, “I think the biggest change which Steven made in his draft, which we didn’t do, is that he gave it a kind of uplifting feeling at the end, a kind of E.T. thing. And also Steven came up with some amazing characters that weren’t in the original drafts. That’s really the direction he went — it just wasn’t what we were going for. We were going for something much more like Alien.”

Certainly, Silver’s decision would have been endorsed by action star Sylvester Stallone, who had previously met with de Souza to discuss a potential rewrite of his 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man, and had been impressed with the writer’s ideas. “They wanted a total reinvention of the script,” de Souza says of ISOBAR. “The original script was one of these usual dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures, and the movie was a complete rip-off of Aliens. It was sort of like Aliens combined with Alien, with a squad of guys assigned to catch this monster and bring it in for study by ‘The Company’ — a shameless rip-off. But then they had to get the train to its final destination, which made no sense at all.” After all, de Souza reasoned, if The Company wants to keep the existence of the monster secret, and has reason to believe that it may be dangerous, it would be more prudent to land the creature closer to its final destination. “Plus, if they’re going to take it to some military facility where they’re going to study it, wouldn’t they have an airstrip there? So from page one it made no sense.”

De Souza was equally nonplussed by the script’s description of the monster itself, which he describes as “a guy-in-a-suit kind of creature. It lived off adrenaline,” he adds, “sucking adrenaline out of your body with these big nails, like a vampire. It reminded me way too much of a picture called It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which was itself a rip-off of ‘Black Destroyer’ and ‘Discord in Scarlet’, from A.E. van Vogt’s short story collection The Voyage of the Space Beagle. So with ISOBAR, you had a rip-off of a rip-off.” Overall, he says, “It was too much like Alien, the monster wasn’t fresh enough and there was no explanation of why the world was this way — it was one of these science fiction movies where it’s supposed to be the near-future, but it’s a completely implausible near-future without any kind of explanation. The script was just embarrassing.

“I told the producers, ‘The biggest problem you have here is Sly doesn’t want to be ‘sci-fi Rambo’, and even if he’s not sci-fi Rambo, you want to make him a scientist, which makes him culpable because he brought the thing onto a civilian train, and as soon as he let his superiors convince him that it’s a good idea to bring a dangerous creature onto a civilian train, he’s poisoned as a hero.’” De Souza felt that audiences wouldn’t respect a character who makes the wrong moral choices, unless the consequences are dealt with in the course of the film. “So I said, ‘If Sly’s trying to do something different, and if everybody keeps saying he wants to do something like Die Hard, let him be just an ordinary guy on the train,’” de Souza continues. “I mean, in Die Hard, Bruce Willis was a cop, but he was so over matched, he was like an ordinary guy. They didn’t make him a Green Beret or Special Forces; he was just a cop and he had nine cartridges in his pistol, and that was it. So I said, ‘Let’s do something like that with Sly.’ And they said, ‘Well, what about a security guard?’ and I said, ‘No, let’s just have him be a guy on the train.’ I kept coming up against walls, because they said, ‘That’s not special enough.’”

De Souza suggested a compromise, to make the train’s passengers (and, by extension, the audience) assume Stallone’s character was a hero type: “Let’s make them think he’s something special, so people on the train go to him and say, ‘Oh, you must be the hero because of your strange behaviour.’ But he says, ‘Well, actually, I’m...’ — not that this would be it — ‘researching a role for a movie,’ or something, so that the audience is misled, and it turns out Sly is just an ordinary guy.” It was Mario Kassar who finally proposed the solution, recalling a British Airways Concorde flight in which the passenger sitting next to him had made the cabin crew’s journey as difficult as possible. “Mario said that this guy kept ringing the stewardess for all kinds of stuff, like he doesn’t like his pillow... And then at the end of the flight, he called over the stewardess and said, ‘I work for British Airways. That’s why I was being difficult, and you were really great.’ I said, ‘That’s great, Mario, let’s make Sly that guy.’ So once the Sly character identifies himself to the stewardess or the purser, and tells her why he’s been such a pain in the ass, they sort of have to be in charge because they’re at least minor company officials.”

The next challenge was to explain why, in the far future, trains might be the preferred form of transport. De Souza’s solution was to suggest that ozone layer damage or global warming meant that jet-powered air travel was no longer viable. Continuing that theme, “people were wearing masks, cities were burrowing deeper, there were air alerts and large portions of the country had deadly pollution.” Now that de Souza had made the trains ubiquitous, he decided that the one on which the monster gets loose should be a special one. “Let’s make it the inaugural transatlantic train,” he suggested. “Let’s say they’ve built a bridge between Greenland and Iceland, and it’s actually the first train from New York to London; the first trans-continental trip of a magnetic levitation train, so there’s all kinds of hoopla.” Suddenly, ISOBAR began to look less like a traditional Sylvester Stallone vehicle and more like an ensemble piece. “Now it becomes like Murder on the Orient Express or Grand Hotel, with all these wonderful characters,” de Souza points out.

One by one, cast members began to board the project. Future Academy Award-winner Kim Basinger, who had recently appeared as Vicki Vale in Batman, was Stallone’s leading lady. Character actor Michael Jeter (a supporting player in Stallone’s Tango & Cash) signed on as a con artist who had tricked his way onto the train. A part was written specially for Italian screen legend Sophia Loren. James Belushi (Red Heat, K-9) was cast as a boorish entrepreneur who had made his fortune selling eggs and sperm over the equivalent of the Internet. “I could see this coming,” says de Souza, of the inspiration behind Belushi’s character. “He had a thing called ‘Babies R Us’ and he did his own commercial like a car salesman. You saw his ad in the movie, and it was like, ‘Are your sperm slow swimmers? Have your eggs been out of the fridge too long? Call us now — only US, grade A choice farm girls provide our eggs.’ It was comical, but it could be real.” Naturally, de Souza says, the other first class passengers looked down on this nouveau riche figure. “He was like that character in Dinner at Eight, the rich guy who’d made his money in pork rinds. There was also a rich lady travelling with her granddaughter, who’s being taken to an arranged marriage, and a poor boy who’s like a nomad kid, a stowaway. So there was a teenage romance, an older romance between Sly and Kim Basinger, and a couple of great older characters, one of whom was like a Walter Matthau character, because we wanted to get Walter Matthau.”

Perhaps the most important character of all, however, was the creature. Here, de Souza was inspired by the 1957 film 20 Million Miles to Earth, in which the Ymir, an alien creature brought back from Venus, grows to enormous size and threatens the Italian city of Rome. “It starts out very harmless, so you actually feel sorry for it. And then because people are mean to it and a dog attacks it, it ends up becoming violent, and as it gets bigger and bigger it’s a menace, and they kill it on the Colosseum. So we wanted to have some sympathy for this monster until it moults and changes a little bit.” De Souza also suggested making the creature a plant-based life form. “I said, ‘Since we’re stealing from the best, let’s do Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World.’ Because the whole ecology was screwed up, this company had tried to genetically engineer this hybrid plant that would clean up the air. They’d done all kinds of illegal gene-splicing, and they’d created this fast-growing hybrid plant that would manufacture oxygen at a tremendous rate. It was their industrial secret. But they were having problems with it — the previous ones had died, and they had to get this one to London because this time they’d figured out what was wrong. And the thing had this tremendous thirst for water, so once it broke out, it sucked all the water out of its victims, so they’d find somebody and they’d be like a mummy and they’d crumble to dust.”

The creature was designed by multiple Academy Award winner Rick Baker, whose credits ranged from An American Werewolf in London to Gorillas in the Mist. “I actually have a video tape of a monster test Rick Baker did,” de Souza reveals. “He also made the first victim — a very real-looking guy, who had one arm that could move. And when the creature got bigger it had tentacles that wrapped round you and sucked all the water out. It really was amazing.” Despite its influences, he says, “We made a really fresh monster. I liked the monster a lot.”

One of the things de Souza wanted to do was to subvert the audience’s expectations by having the creature kill a character they didn’t expect — a trick as old as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. “We wrote a part for a guy like Clint Eastwood,” he says, “a big star who would come into the movie and say ‘I’m the hero, I’m in charge,’ give everybody a big stirring speech — and then get killed. That happened [years later] in Deep Blue Sea,” he adds, “where Samuel L. Jackson comes in and then gets killed.” Up to this point, Stallone’s character had reluctantly assumed the role of hero: “He says, ‘Until we get to the next train station, when we can sort this out, we have to do things.’ They’ve barricaded the back cars, and they know there’s some kind of creature on the train that’s killing people and they need help. So they go to the next stop, and this guy gets on the train — and we immediately kill him! It was pretty cool.”

The tension is further ratcheted up by the failure of the communication system, meaning that no one on board the train is able to contact the outside world. “Of course, they don’t know that the reason for the failure of the communication system is that the people who brought the thing on the train have sabotaged it, because they don’t want the story getting out — they have to do damage control now,” de Souza explains. “Their plan is to get the creature back under control, get off the train at some point on the line, and kill anybody who knows the truth.” By now, however, the train is out of control, and everyone, good and bad, is forced to work together in order to save the day: “At this point they were probably all in the same cage — they need to keep the creature from coming into this car. So the bad guys and good guys are working together, but you know at a certain point their agendas will diverge.”

“I never read de Souza’s version,” Jim Uhls admits. “I heard that it changed everything to be more of a large-cast Irwin Allen-type of disaster movie.” Nevertheless, it was de Souza’s draft which seemed likely to get a green light from the studio. Production designer Dante Ferretti, a regular collaborator with Federico Fellini and, later, Martin Scorsese, began designing sets, while Academy Award winning costume designer Marilyn Vance (48HRS, Predator, Die Hard) created what de Souza describes as “some very prescient costume designs describing a very retro future.” So advanced was the project that set construction was due to begin within a week, until Carolco collapsed under the strain of a string of flops — most notably Cutthroat Island — and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna went their separate ways, with the latter going on to form Cinergi, where he would draft in de Souza to rewrite another Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Judge Dredd. “It was a shock to me when ISOBAR collapsed, because everything that I’d worked on always got made. It’s a good thing I didn’t buy that Rolls-Royce. I thought it was a great script that should have been made,” he adds, “but movies get made not because the script is great, but because somebody likes the script at that point.”

Ironically, Carolco’s bankruptcy almost gave ISOBAR a second chance, several years after the film and the company jumped the rails. At the bankruptcy hearing for the company, Kassar and Vajna showed up to bid for several of the properties their dissolved company had owned, despite the fact that Carolco’s collapse had left millions of dollars’ worth of debts unpaid. Says de Souza, “You’d think the judge would say, ‘Wait a second, didn’t you guys run the previous company?’” By now, de Souza was among the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, with almost one billion dollars’ worth of box office receipts from films bearing either his name, or his imprint, and he attended the hearing hoping to buy back the ISOBAR script, which he felt was among his best work. “I think they showed maybe $5 or 7 million ‘negative’ cost,” he recalls, referring to the cumulative amount of money Carolco had spent on the script, set designs, Rick Baker’s creature tests and the director’s customary ‘pay or play’ deal, which would have to be paid out of any future profits. Although the bailiffs initially set a price of fifty cents on the dollar, meaning that the project could be bought for half of the costs accrued against it, it was too rich for de Souza’s blood. “There was no way I could go there,” he says.

At least one person appeared to believe that de Souza had made a successful bid for the project. Although he had been lauded for his acting performance in Cop Land, Sylvester Stallone’s career had suffered a slump in the decade following 1993’s Cliffhanger, the box office performances of films like Judge Dredd, Get Carter, Driven and D-Tox being indicative of a precipitous downturn in his popularity. What he needed was a sure-fire comeback film like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 3. “Sometime in late 2002 or early 2003 I went to a dinner party, and Sly was there, with his manager,” de Souza recalls. “I started to think that the reason I was invited to this dinner party was because they thought I controlled the rights to the ISOBAR script. The conversation turned in a very clumsy fashion to that project, you know: ‘We should make that now. I’m ready to do that now.’” It was not to be. Although Stallone’s star would recover some of its former sheen, thanks to the critical and commercial success of Rocky Balboa and, to a lesser degree, Rambo, he no longer boasted the box office clout to get something as expensive as ISOBAR into cinemas.

In fact, the rights to the ISOBAR project wound up in the hands of two of its longest-term fans: Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who had by now scored big with Stargate for MGM and Independence Day for Fox, and were about to make their first film under a new deal with Sony Pictures. Aware that all interests in the ISOBAR property were about to be auctioned for what amount to cents on the dollar, with all debts forgiven, Emmerich and Devlin persuaded Sony to buy it for them. In the wake of the box office disappointment Godzilla — if $379 million worldwide can be described as disappointing — the pair had failed to launch Supertanker, a disaster movie about a gigantic ship filled with natural gas which terrorists use to hold San Diego to ransom, nor a big-budget remake of the sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage. Both projects had been written by Tab Murphy, best known as screenwriter of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Atlantis: The Lost Continent and Brother Bear for Disney, and as writer-director of Last of the Dogmen. As Murphy recalls, “I met Roland and Dean when they were in Yuma, Arizona, making Stargate, which was produced by Joel Michaels, who also produced Last of the Dogmen. Joel suggested that I hang out on the set of Stargate, and we all became friends.”

It was Devlin who suggested Murphy take a pass at Supertanker to try to jump start that project, and subsequently brought him on to write the update of Fantastic Voyage. “Then they had me write a script based on an original idea of Roland’s, a science fiction story set on a savage planet where these guys come and have a hunting expedition every year to hunt the monsters. It was a big, fun tentpole movie. And that’s, ultimately, what led to ISOBAR.” Says Devlin, “Tab was the first person I hired to do a rewrite after we got the rights out of bankruptcy. He’s one of my favourite writers. We’ve worked with him three or four times now, and think he’s terrific, really talented. And you couldn’t meet a nicer guy in Hollywood.”

Murphy believes this would have been a few years after de Souza’s involvement, and certainly after 2001, when Emmerich and Devlin parted company, the latter setting up an umbrella company for future projects, Electric Entertainment. “They had kind of gone their separate ways at that point,” says Murphy, “but they had agreed that there were certain projects they would work on together. ISOBAR was one of them. It was a back-burner project for them, which they wanted to re-activate, so suddenly there was a big push.” Murphy visited Devlin at Electric Entertainment’s offices, looked at all of the pre-production artwork, read de Souza’s draft, and discussed the producer’s objectives for the first ISOBAR script of the twenty-first century. “Then I went off and wrote a draft that actually wasn’t very well received,” Murphy recalls. “I think it had to do with the lead character, whom I had written as a very hardbitten, cynical sort of anti-hero, which wasn’t what they were looking for. Then I wrote another draft which they were happy with.”

Murphy’s second draft, entitled The ISOBAR Run, begins with a view of the Earth from space. “But something is terribly wrong. The entire surface of Mother Earth is covered with a dirty brown haze, the atmosphere stagnant and poisonous, familiar land formations barely discernible. We are looking at a dead planet.” The script then cuts to ‘Old Los Angeles — 2097,’ where ‘bedos’ scratch for a living on the toxic surface, at the mercy not only of disease and starvation, but also regular murderous sweeps by bio-suited ‘science cops.’ “Healthy living through genocide,” mutters Prine, a new recruit, sardonically, before rescuing a twelve-year-old urchin, Ollie, from death by cleanup squad. Below ground, in ‘New Los Angeles,’ society is flourishing, with “streets filled with electric cars that crisscross a labyrinth of low buildings as far as the eye can see. Artificial lighting lends an eerie fluorescent glow to the atmosphere.” Prine and Ollie are about to witness the maiden voyage of the ‘ISOBAR Mark V,’[3] a floating supertrain linking North America with Asia through a tunnel at up to 2,000 kilometres per hour. Prine follows Ollie onto the train, which leaves with both of them on board.

As in de Souza’s version, the inaugural ride of the Los Angeles-Hawaii-Tokyo run boasts a motley assortment of passengers, in the classic disaster movie mold; for more obscure reasons, it is also being used to transport a secret, deadly cargo: “a highly mobile plant hybrid, an aggressive organism capable of hunting down water in arid conditions, much like a predator hunts down its prey.” Naturally, the creature gets loose on the train, killing anyone it encounters and sucking them dry of the thing it feeds on: water. As the train hurtles towards Hawaii, its first stop, the creature continues to cause chaos, building a dense jungle of vines and webbing in which it ‘stores’ victims, reminiscent of the deleted cocoon sequence from Alien, which was re-engineered in Aliens. “The men watch with a mixture of astonishment and horror as the room turns into a living jungle. The creature’s webbing soon covers every last inch of surface area, creating an alien, otherworldly environment.”[4] Along the way, the creature causes sufficient structural damage for the train to crash, just before it reaches Hawaii. Now, not only is the ISOBAR on its inaugural journey, with a deadly escaped plant and a stowaway on board, it’s also a runaway train! With half of the train’s thousand passengers dead and many of the rest injured, Prine discovers that the creature has the potential to replenish the Earth’s stagnant oxygen supply within ten years — assuming it isn’t killed first. Can Prine risk destroying the creature, even if it represents mankind’s only hope of returning to the surface?[5]

“What we asked Tab to do was try and update the version that Roland and I had written together,” says Devlin, “because we’d only ever done a first draft, we’d never really gotten to ‘write it out.’ When Tab came in, we were like, ‘Let’s really flesh this thing out the way we want to do it,’ and he did. He did a great job at it.” Murphy’s advantage, he says, was that the conceptual artwork was on hand to inspire the writing. “Tab had all of Roland’s artwork. I’ve got at least forty paintings of what the world looks like, some of whom he’d done with Dante Ferretti, and others with people he had worked with since Germany. It was Roland’s idea to turn the train into a kind of Titanic — this five-storey über-train, designed to look like it came out of the 1920s. And then of course this is supposed to take place in a world that exists underground. So it’s got this amazing design element to it.”

Hopes that Murphy’s take on the material might finally get ISOBAR the green light proved unfounded. “I never really heard the ins and outs of how aggressively they tried to get it set up and made, but I just know it was going to be an expensive movie — $120 million at the time, although I think he was trying to get it down to $80 million.” Says Devlin, “it was a $90 million movie back in 1991, so it would be more like $200 million today.” In the wake of his and Emmerich’s post-Patriot split, Devlin was having a difficult time getting anything made: while Emmerich went on to direct such mega-budget films as The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and 10,000 B.C., Devlin’s output as producer had been somewhat lower profile, including the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, the bona fide box office flop Flyboys and TNT’s television series Leverage. Nevertheless, says Devlin, “We brought it out to Cannes, in about 2007, and much to our surprise all the buyers remembered it from way back when, so suddenly we had all these very high numbers for foreign sales, almost enough to go out and make the picture without anybody attached. But at the end of the day we weren’t able to get all the financing together, so I put it back into my refrigerator, and we’ve just kept working on it.”

More recently, Devlin found himself working with Marco Schnabel, who had graduated from crew member on the Austin Powers films to director of Mike Myers’ unloved comedy The Love Guru, and written two TV movie sequels for actor Noah Wyle (and producer Devlin): The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines (2006) and The Librarian III: The Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008). “We started talking about ISOBAR,” says Devlin, “and Marco just had this idea, this concept, that would make it much more emotional in the third act. And I just loved it, so I said, ‘Take a shot at it.’ We hired him, and he did. It was always fun, and the latest draft has all the fun, but now it’s more emotional.”

In the years since Stallone was on board, action heroes have evolved, with brains and heart winning out over muscle and firepower. Two decades after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and one-time ISOBAR star Sylvester Stallone ruled, the new box office champions are Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Robert Downey Jr. According to Devlin, ISOBAR’s central role reflects that change. “It’s a much grittier character now,” he says, “and it doesn’t have to be an action hero. What it has to be is someone who can carry the depth of the character because he’s going through a lot and he’s reliving a crisis in his life that happened years earlier, so it’s pretty tough. To me, someone like Clive Owen would be amazing.

“I think it’s a great project,” he adds, “and I still intend on making it. I’m still very optimistic that we’re going to get this thing going in the next couple of years.”

___________

1
Species director Roger Donaldson ultimately used the train as part of Sil’s dream, giving science fiction fans their only chance to see what might have been if Scott had decided to board The Train.

2 The scientific principle, at least, was sound: a vacuum-propelled locomotive developed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel was in use for some time, until the amount of sealant required to constantly re-seal the vacuum tubes running along the centre rail began to reach impractical levels, and the whole system was scrapped.

3 Murphy’s draft unscrambles the acronym to ‘Intercontinental Superconducting Oscillating Ballistic Automatic Railway’, in place of Uhls’ ‘Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway.’

4 Reminiscent of the mutated ‘Plant 42’ in Resident Evil.

5 The answer, of course, is ‘Yes.’ The scientists who created it could presumably make another one using the same formula.

WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?

Before Scorsese’s The Aviator took off, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, Milos Forman and the aptly-named Hughes brothers all had their own pet Howard Hughes projects

“I had lots of people calling me up to say it’s one of the best scripts they ever read, but of course they wouldn’t be making it. People say that to you all the time, even about dreck, but this time I kind of believed them.”

— screenwriter David Koepp on his unproduced script Mr Hughes

Considering the name Howard Hughes is as synonymous with Hollywood as it is with wealth, eccentricity and aviation — and crackpot schemes combining all three — it is surprising that more films have not been made about the famously reclusive billionaire.

Not that Hollywood hasn’t tried, however: in the decades between Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), at least half a dozen directors of equal prominence, many of them with a more commercial track record than Messrs Demme and Scorsese, saw their own diverse Howard Hughes projects wither on the Hollywood vine. Nevertheless, the fact that so many tried, and failed, to bring to the screen their own vision, or version, of Hughes’ multi-faceted life is testament to Hollywood’s fascination with a man who, at one time, produced a plethora of films, bedded a string of starlets, and even ran a movie studio of his own. As Variety columnist, author and former studio head Peter Bart said recently, “Who else could have taken on the censors, the Mafia, the studio power elite and virtually every nubile star and starlet and still survive?” Well, almost.

Between his careers as aviator, inventor and corporate mogul, Howard Hughes somehow found time to foster such films as Hell’s Angels, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story and The Outlaw, with advertisements for the latter implying that star Jane Russell’s ample bosom was “two great reasons” to see the film.[1] But while Hughes was gaudy even by Hollywood standards, his heart seemed to be in the right place: when chief censor Will Hays, the driving force behind the Hays Code which hobbled Hollywood from the 1930s onwards, tried to alter the ending of Scarface and subtitle the film The Shame of the Nation, Hughes strongly objected — although ultimately backed down. Earlier, at the age of twenty-four, he orchestrated a lavish première for Hell’s Angels, described by Charlie Chaplin as “the greatest night in show business.” Fifteen thousand people massed around Hollywood Boulevard, resulting in the biggest traffic jam in the history of Los Angeles. Once, Hughes let it be known that he was simultaneously negotiating to buy Fox, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros, though in the end he settled for RKO Pictures. Along the way, he kept gossip columnists up at night with his frenzied pursuit of such starlets as Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn, despite biographers’ claims of impotence, homosexuality, or both.

Away from Hollywood, Hughes’ lifestyle was as eclectic as it was eccentric: having inherited the family business at the age of sixteen, he led the Hughes Tool Co from strength to strength, founded Trans World Airlines and the Hughes Aircraft Company, and amassed a personal fortune large enough to make him America’s first billionaire — even though he blew millions on such crackpot inventions as the Spruce Goose, a gigantic seaplane. Despite his enormous wealth, success, popularity and matinée idol looks, following a near-fatal plane crash which left him dependent on painkillers, his last years were spent as a total recluse, living in a Las Vegas hotel in mortal fear of germs and nuclear fallout, growing his hair and fingernails long, wearing tissue boxes on his feet, and suffering a codeine dependence which made him alternately paranoid and incoherent. By the time he died in 1976, one biography alleged, his arms were spotted with broken pieces of hypodermic needles embedded in his skin.

Despite his association with Hollywood, there were no stars at Hughes’ funeral, and his long estrangement from his family meant that few of his own flesh and blood were at the graveside either. Octogenarian Terry Moore, Hughes’ legal widow, is one of the few who really knew him who remembers him fondly: “He had seen me in The Return of October, where I played an orphan girl,” she recalls. “He was an orphan himself, and had a very close-knit family and grew up very naïve.” The pair became friends while Moore was starring in Mighty Joe Young (1949) for RKO Pictures, and Hughes later taught the actress to fly, helping her to become only the third woman in the world to fly a jet engine aircraft. “Howard and I had so much in common in astrology,” she adds. “Our sun and our moon and rising signs were exactly the same — a horoscope that only one couple in ten million have. And we had the same interests: we loved flying and motion pictures. He was the first love of my life, someone you don’t forget, and raised me almost as much as my parents. I loved him then, I love him now and I will always love him.”

Since the early 1970s, while Hughes was still alive, actor-producer-director Warren Beatty had talked of making a biographical film about the reclusive billionaire, which, after a proposed collaboration with Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader fell through, he planned to write with Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). When this, too, failed to coalesce, Goldman ultimately wrote his own script, Melvin and Howard, which won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1981 and Jason Robards a Best Actor nomination for his take on Hughes. Although Howard Hughes subsequently appeared as an incidental character in several films, played by Dean Stockwell in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Terry O’Quinn in The Rocketeer, the first of the new wave of proposed Hughes biopics did not begin until the 1990s, when the declassification of 2,500 FBI and CIA documents shed light on the last years of Las Vegas’ most famous recluse, sparking a new wave of biographies, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Pat Broeske and Peter Harry Brown, and Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes. Suddenly, Howard Hughes was news again.

Barlett and Steele’s book became the first firm subject of a proposed film when, in March 1998, Johnny Depp signed on to star in an adaptation, to be directed by the aptly named Armenian-American film-makers Allen and Albert Hughes (Dead Presidents) from a screenplay by Terry Hayes (Dead Calm). Though the project ultimately went nowhere, Depp, Hayes and the Hughes brothers later collaborated on an adaptation of Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper saga From Hell. In the meantime, Mutual Film Company and producer Mark Gordon had announced plans to produce their own film based on The Hoax, Clifford Irving’s 1981 book about a fake Howard Hughes autobiography he sold to publisher McGraw-Hill a decade earlier, and the prison term he served when Hughes alerted the publisher to the fact that he hadn’t written a word of it. Irving claimed that Hughes had read the book and changed his mind about publishing it, but was exposed when the reclusive billionaire himself came out of hiding — for the last time — to deny its authenticity. Irving later revised and released the book on the Internet. “I was caught up in a rushing stream from which I could not free myself, even though it was self-destructive and crazy,” Irving commented later, “because everyone else was just as crazy as I was in accepting the legitimacy of it. I couldn’t get off the speeding bus.” It would take a number of years, however, before The Hoax would materialize.

Then, in August 1998, Variety announced that three key figures behind that summer’s thriller Snake Eyes were planning to collaborate on a unique and intriguing take on the Hughes legend: actor Nicolas Cage, an Oscar-winner for Leaving Las Vegas, and star of the action thrillers Face/Off, Con Air and The Rock; director Brian De Palma, who had helmed a loose remake of the Hughes-produced Scarface; and screenwriter David Koepp, who had written De Palma’s Mission: Impossible and Carlito’s Way, in addition to such blockbusters as Jurassic Park. As Koepp recalls, “I was working on Snake Eyes and Nic Cage mentioned to De Palma that he’d always been interested in playing Hughes. So Brian and I bought a bunch of books and started digging into it.” Koepp had initially suspected that they had taken on an impossible mission: “The impossible part about telling anyone’s life story is it never plays out in three acts; lives aren’t inherently dramatic, structurally speaking. Aristotle would not approve of the way your average human life is laid out. But then Brian hit on the idea of telling the story of Howard Hughes from the point of view of Clifford Irving, and that seemed to me to be genius, because Irving’s hoax had a perfect dramatic structure for the spine of the film — conception (of the hoax idea and of Hughes as a young man), execution (of the hoax itself and Hughes as an adult running his empire and his love life), and collapse (hoax revealed and Hughes’ descent into mental illness).”

“That’s a vast project,” De Palma told Entertainment Tonight Online, “because his life has so many aspects to it. To convey it into a compelling dramatic story is a great challenge.” Nevertheless, Koepp says that this approach, “influenced by half a dozen books, not least by Irving’s own boastings about his scheme, in various public record articles and books,” gave him a unique advantage over the other Hughes projects, since he was not limited to the facts of Hughes’ life, but Irving’s portrait of him. “Since we were telling the story via his lying Boswell,” he explains, referring to Dr Samuel Johnson’s biographer, “we had access to the whole of his life. We encapsulated his childhood in a speech or two, then focused on three eras, which roughly paralleled the three chapters of the Irving story: conception, execution, collapse.” There were many aspects of Hughes’ life — or, at least, Irving’s interpretation of it — that interested Koepp. Above all, though, “it was the fingernails. I just remember being a kid and watching the CBS news during the Irving hoax, and they had all those reporters crowded around a speaker box in Los Angeles interviewing Hughes over the phone line, and he was denying all the eccentricities of his lifestyle that Irving had posited, and it just had the opposite effect of what he intended. Because you couldn’t see him, your mind drew a truly insane portrait of the guy on the other end of the line.”

One equally bizarre aspect of the De Palma/Koepp project, entitled Mr Hughes, was the fact that Nicolas Cage planned to play dual roles in the film: Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. “That was Brian’s idea, but I never agreed with it,” Koepp admits. “I felt they were both such strong roles that we had a great chance to get two terrific actors. I also felt the stunt would be distracting, and didn’t contribute much.” Nevertheless, the conceit of having Oscar-winner and $20 million man Cage play the subject and architect of the fraudulent autobiography arguably gave the project an advantage over the Hughes brothers’ proposed film, and Mutual Film Company’s own take on The Hoax, scripted by William Wheeler. Nevertheless, says Koepp, “There have been Howard Hughes projects floating around for decades. We tried not to worry about them. We knew [ours] was probably doomed, but we figured since we had a director and a star we probably had a leg up.”

Echoing the last years of Hughes himself, Koepp holed up in a hotel room in New York, writing the script in “a crazy burst in May and June 1998. The first draft was dated July 4th, which I liked,” he recalls. “I was very happy with it. Brian loved it. I still think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.” Unfortunately, in the interim, Snake Eyes had failed to match its box office and critical expectations — as Koepp puts it, “just not big enough: didn’t lose money, but didn’t make any either” — as a result of which Disney put the project in turnaround, despite having spent a reported $1.75 million on the script. “Nobody wanted Brian and Nic back on another movie, especially a (very) expensive biography. It was sad, I had lots of people calling me up to say it’s one of the best scripts they ever read, but of course they wouldn’t be making it. People say that to you all the time, even about dreck, but this time I kind of believed them. Foolishly, probably. I don’t know, I loved it. Still do.

“I made a brief run at directing it myself for a much smaller budget than Brian felt he needed,” Koepp adds. “[I] had dinner with Nic to talk about it and he seemed very enthusiastic, but then I never heard back. He’d lost his nerve, I think.” By that time, Cage had arguably satisfied his desire to play dual roles in a single film with his Oscar-nominated turn in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, in which he plays screenwriting twins trying to crack an adaptation of an eccentric man’s biography. Would Koepp, who has since directed Stir of Echoes and an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, consider anyone else for the role of Howard Hughes? “Johnny Depp,” he says. “He’s one of our greatest actors. Fearless and inventive. I’m biased,” he adds, referring to his collaboration with Depp on Secret Window, Secret Garden, “but I know I’m hardly alone in this opinion. Unfortunately, Nic Cage is also one of the producers of Mr Hughes and won’t let the thing go, either. So it’s stuck in limbo. Maybe someday I’ll try to pry it out of his fingers.”

In June 1999, Variety announced that Michael Mann, director of Heat and The Insider, had set up a Howard Hughes project under his deal with Disney — the same studio which had bailed on De Palma’s project. Leonardo DiCaprio was reportedly on board to portray Hughes as the dashing, womanising aviator of the 1930s, from a script by Gladiator co-screenwriter John Logan, who had detailed the making of one RKO Pictures production, Citizen Kane, in RKO 281. “Leo’s been phenomenal to work with,” Logan later enthused to BBCi Films. “He is such an intelligent and polite and responsive young artist. When I first met him, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, ‘Is he just going to be a movie star?’ But he was so polite and so completely committed and involved and going through it page by page, discussing and tweaking things, I couldn’t be more impressed.” Charles Higham, author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life — which documented Hughes’ alleged homosexual affair with Cary Grant, and his arrest for molesting a young man in Santa Monica — was among those to comment on DiCaprio’s casting. “Hughes was childlike in many ways, pampered and spoiled, and he was very self-centered and self-absorbed,” he told the New York Post. “There is something in DiCaprio’s personality which is very singular and concentrated, and I think [he’d] do well at conveying a self-obsessed, self-concerned personality.” Added Mann, “Leonardo has all of those qualities of the young Hughes — he’s high flying, has lots of sexuality and is iconoclastic.”

After the commercial failure of Mann’s critically lauded The Insider and the lacklustre performance of The Beach, DiCaprio’s first starring role in the wake of Titanic, Disney appeared to have second thoughts about what would inevitably be another big-budget production, and soon put yet another Howard Hughes project in turnaround. While Mann went on to direct another biopic, Ali, New Line picked up his still-untitled Howard Hughes film in February 2000, with studio president Michael De Luca describing the film as “Hughes’ formative years while he was setting air-speed records and charging through Hollywood,” and Mann as “the quintessential actor’s director who has proven time and again that his gift for dramatic storytelling is rivalled by none.” The fact that Logan’s take on the Hughes story ended with the triumphant test flight of the Spruce Goose on 2 November 1947, long before the dashing womaniser became a reclusive paranoiac, suggested that it would be easier to secure financing for the film, since Titanic star DiCaprio would not be required to cover his matinée idol features with heavy makeup to play the older Hughes. Nevertheless, when De Luca left New Line, the untitled project was put in turnaround again, although Mann and DiCaprio remained committed to it.

In March 2000, Alan Ladd Jr entered the fray with a project closely linked to actress Terry Moore (née Helen Koford), who was married to Hughes between 1949 and 1956, and won the right to call herself Hughes’ widow after a protracted legal battle. “I never got a divorce from Howard,” she explains. “I left him because I thought he was cheating on me, and married Stewart Cramer.” A staunch defender of Hughes and naturally antipathetic to many of the published biographies, Moore met Ladd through a mutual friend and urged him to tell her version of events in a film project to counterbalance productions focussing on the more bizarre, and possibly baseless, stories surrounding the troubled tycoon.

“Much of what has been written about him was just false,” Ladd told Variety. “He never had those huge fingernails and toenails, that was just not true.” Nevertheless, he added, “There are some wonderful anecdotes. He was deaf in one ear, which caused his shyness, and his mother had a major clean fetish. In fact, when he came over, he would have to wash his hands in lye — all kinds of awful stuff.” More shocking were Moore’s claims that her ex-husband’s death was caused by a group of former employees who kept him isolated from the world. “He was kept a drugged, virtual prisoner,” said Ladd. “It’s just a horrible story.” The basis of the film would be two books by Moore which Ladd had optioned, The Passions of Howard Hughes and The Beauty and the Billionaire, as well as Moore’s ‘life rights.’ “What I want to tell is the story of his true genius,” he stated. “I’m not interested in his sleeping with Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn. This would approach the genius of a man, while exposing the myths and truths, not the sexploitations.” Whether this was the version of events likely to appeal to Hollywood, however, was open to question. Although no actor was connected with the Ladd project, Moore herself reveals a number of candidates whom she would find suitable. “Jeremy Irons, Pierce Brosnan or Nicolas Cage would all be very interesting,” she says. “You could go with Tom Hanks — he’s got the same kind of qualities that Howard had: he’s tall and lanky and has that kind of sweetness about him, and great charisma.” Moore claims that licensed pilot John Travolta had bought one of Hughes’ old aircraft to endear himself to her, and that Nicolas Cage took flying lessons in a bid to win the role. “So when you come down to it, there’s really a lot of people.”

As the twenty-first century dawned, more Hughes movie projects began to emerge. New Regency, which was once lined up to partner Disney in the Mann-DiCaprio production, revealed its intention to make a film of its own, pairing Edward Norton — who had won his breakthrough role in Primal Fear after DiCaprio backed out — with veteran director Milos Forman. The untitled film had been scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who had co-written two other biopics for director Forman: The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, the story of comedian Andy Kaufman. “Ten years ago, we would have said, ‘How can you go up against Warren Beatty?’ and now it’s, ‘How can you go up against Michael Mann and Leonardo?’” Alexander told Variety. Karaszewski, meanwhile, admitted that fierce competition from fellow filmmakers made the project a dicey prospect. “As writers, the problem is we’d have to spend the year working hard before finding out the project across the street had gotten a green light and we’ve wasted our time,” he said. “With both Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt, we knew we were the only ones.”

Events took a turn for the weird in February 2001, when Inside.com reported that Charles Evans Jr, nephew of one-time studio head and film producer Robert Evans, was suing New Line Cinema, Michael Mann and Artists Management Group (AMG), claiming that the Howard Hughes project he had nurtured for years had been taken away from him. “No one has worked harder to bring the story of Howard Hughes to the screen in contemporary Hollywood than Evans,” Pat Broeske, co-author of Howard Hughes: The Untold Story, asserted. “It is a passion of Charlie Evans.” In his lawsuit, Evans claimed to have conceived the idea for a film about Hughes’ tempestuous youth in 1993, and spent several years poring over the details of his life, before securing the rights to adapt The Untold Story for a film. Through his company Accapella Films, Evans hired actor Kevin Spacey to direct the film, securing financing from New Regency, which hired Jack Fincher to write a screenplay. Meanwhile, Evans learned that DiCaprio was interested in playing Hughes, and entered into negotiations with DiCaprio’s manager at AMG, Rick Yorn. “As a result of these discussions,” the lawsuit stated, “Yorn, acting on behalf of DiCaprio, informed Evans that DiCaprio would never join the project as long as any director (i.e. Spacey) not selected by DiCaprio, was attached.” After what he described as “many sleepless nights”, Evans picked DiCaprio over Spacey, and when DiCaprio settled on Michael Mann as his favoured director and made a studio production pact, Evans found himself cut out of the deal. The lawsuit was eventually settled, with Evans winning the right to a credit as producer, along with Mann and his partner Sandy Climan, DiCaprio, and co-financer Graham King, president of Initial Entertainment Group.

Yet another Howard Hughes project emerged when Variety announced in September 2001 that William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, would produce and direct a “feature film or telefilm or miniseries” based on Richard Hack’s book Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire, based on archive material supplied by Hughes associate Robert Mahue, who would serve as a consultant on the film. “I’ve been fascinated by Hughes ever since I came to Hollywood in the sixties,” said Friedkin, then preparing to direct Tommy Lee Jones (who had, coincidentally, portrayed the title character in the 1977 TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes) in The Hunted. “He is a kind of King Lear — without the daughters. There are so many stories: his genius as a visionary, the weird Hollywood saga, how he transformed Vegas, how he revised the airline industry — and, of course, the sex.”

Friedkin went on to reveal that he intended to begin the epic biopic, which he admitted could run to three hours, with Hughes as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who, upon his father’s death, inherits the family business, the Hughes Tool Co. Asked about casting, Friedkin listed the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Edward Norton — all of whom were already attached to, or hovering around, other Hughes projects. At the time, Friedkin was embroiled in a court battle over profits for Warner Bros’ The Exorcist, and the fact that the rights to Hack’s book had been purchased by Warner Bros subsidiary Castle Rock suggested that the film might find a home there. Within a few months, however, Friedkin had ceded the director’s chair to writer-director Christopher Nolan, who had followed his mind-bending Memento with a star-studded remake of Scandinavian thriller Insomnia. “It was the extreme nature of his story [that attracted me],” Nolan told SF Chronicle. “Here was someone who had everything and nothing at the same time.” Speaking to christophernolan.com, he added, “It’s about the extremes to which one man can live — the glamour, the wealth, then the claustrophobic unhappiness.”

Nolan set to work on the script after Insomnia wrapped, only mildly concerned about the legacy of unproduced Howard Hughes scripts. “It is the sort of great unmade Hollywood movie, and if you ask me why, I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” Nolan stated. “But I think casting is a large part of it, and I think Jim Carrey is just perfect for the role. He’ll be able to pull off something I don’t think many performers could.” Speaking to The Calgary Sun, he added, “Jim was born to play Hughes. He has this amazing gift to channel real people. I’m convinced his Howard Hughes will be every bit as astonishing as his Andy Kaufman was in Man on the Moon.” As Carrey himself told Entertainment Weekly, “In certain ways, I probably am him. I want to find out what personal chasm needed to be filled — his ‘Rosebud’,” he added, a reference to the obsessive subject of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. “Hughes is like everyone else, trying to find that thing you’re missing, but it’s in the fire and you have to let it go, you don’t go on and you don’t grow up.”

When Carrey became attached to the Christopher Nolan project, Michael Mann decided to step aside as director of the John Logan-scripted Howard Hughes film, to which Leonardo DiCaprio had remained attached since Mann had brought it to New Line from Disney two years earlier. Mann’s decision allowed director Martin Scorsese, then busy directing DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, to take over as pilot of the Hughes project, newly titled The Aviator. As Variety reported it, “Mann apparently agreed to step aside as director because the Carrey-Nolan project looked ready to go, and he didn’t want to hold up the DiCaprio pic; when their first choice, Scorsese, said yes, his decision was made easier.” Scorsese’s love of old Hollywood made him a natural choice as director of a film about Hughes’ Hollywood years. And yet, as he later told Variety, “I was never, like so many others, obsessed with Howard Hughes.” It was DiCaprio, he said, who brought the script to his attention during the shooting of Gangs of New York, “but by page three of the screenplay I knew this was a film I had to do.”

By early 2002, the race between the various competing Hughes projects had been won, with The Aviator having emerged as the front-runner, thanks to a financing deal struck between Miramax, Warner Bros and IEG (which also co-financed Ali and Gangs of New York) to back the $100 million-plus picture, which amassed an impressive supporting cast, including Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Alec Baldwin, John C. Reilly, Alan Alda and even pop star Gwen Stefani (as Jean Harlow). Although The Aviator won five Academy Awards from eleven nominations — including a Best Actor nod for DiCaprio as Hughes — the film was hardly a financial success, and did not inspire many Hollywood studios to fast-track their own Howard Hughes properties.

One exception was Mark Gordon’s long-gestating film adaptation of The Hoax, released to widespread critical acclaim in 2007, with Richard Gere portraying Clifford Irving for director Lasse Hallström. In the meantime, even the success of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception didn’t empower director Christopher Nolan to get his own Howard Hughes film off the ground, although rumours persist that he might make it after The Dark Knight Rises, for release in 2014 — giving The Aviator a ten-year-wide berth. “There’s no sense of any kind of race,” the director told The Z Review, “simply because it’s too difficult a subject. And I think that’s why these projects have tended not to happen in the past. Any time you go into making a film there are other factors around and you just have to believe in the project you are doing, that it will find its way to get made.” Nevertheless, David Koepp, who has described his own project, Mr Hughes, as “deader than a doornail,” suggests that there might still be room for his own film to be made at some point in the future — especially if he can get Johnny Depp, now a bona fide box office star, on board. After all, he says, “Stranger things have happened, many of which are documented in Mr Hughes!”

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1 It was later followed by a 3D Russell vehicle, The French Line, which, the ads promised, would “knock both your eyes out!”

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

The title character of Neil Gaiman’s critically acclaimed comic book The Sandman visited Hell. Unlike the film version, however, he made it back

“The Sandman movie is in Development Hell and may it rot there forever.”

— Neil Gaiman

In September 1987, DC Comics editor Karen Berger called Neil Gaiman, one of the UK’s most promising comic talents, and asked if he would be interested in writing a monthly title for the publisher. Berger had edited Gaiman’s Black Orchid, a lavish comic book miniseries illustrated by the author’s friend and collaborator Dave McKean; now she proposed reviving a long-forgotten DC character, ‘the Sandman’, and taking him in a radical new direction.

After a few false starts, Gaiman finally arrived at the premise and characters which would, over the course of the series’ seventy-five-issue lifetime (not counting a few additional stories in prose and sequential form published outside of the ongoing monthly title), become familiar to millions of fans worldwide: the Sandman — also known as Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, the Dream-King, or sometimes simply Dream — is the personification of the dream world where we spend a third of our lives; older and more powerful than the gods, he is also one of the seven ‘Endless’: the others being his brothers Destiny and Destruction, and sisters Death, Desire, Delirium and Despair. Early collaborators, including artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, colourist Robbie Busch, letterer and logo designer Todd Klein and cover artist Dave McKean, helped shape the many and varied worlds of The Sandman, while many others — including Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Steve Parkhouse, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Jill Thompson, Vince Locke and Daniel Vozzo — would help to carry the series through its seven-year life cycle.

The first issue of The Sandman appeared in comic stores in December 1988, signalling the arrival not only of one of the most important, critically acclaimed and commercially successful titles of the era, but also, in Gaiman, of a significant new talent. Gaiman was immediately bracketed with a group of mostly British writers, including Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, who would finally earn comic books — a medium barely a half century old, and still in its infancy as an art form — the right to be taken seriously in literary terms. “Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture,” Gaiman wrote in the afterword to the first collection of tales from The Sandman, entitled Preludes & Nocturnes. “[It was] as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him.”

In its lifetime, The Sandman won a great many awards, not the least of which were the two most prestigious in comics: the Eisner and the Harvey. Issue nineteen, a self-contained story entitled ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (and inspired by the play) won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, making it the first ongoing comic ever to win a literary award. The title also won acclaim from a wide variety of other sources — Mikal Gilmore wrote in Rolling Stone that “to read The Sandman is to read something more than an imaginative comic: it is to read a powerful new literature fresh with the resonance of timeless myths” — and won such diverse fans as Clive Barker, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Norman Mailer and singer-songwriter Tori Amos, the lyrics of whose song ‘Tear In Your Hand’ refer to “me and Neil” hanging out with “the Dream-King”. Within six months of The Sandman’s debut, Tim Burton’s Batman had heralded an inevitable new wave of films based on comic books, and with the takeover of DC Comics by Time Warner (the parent company of the Warner Bros film studio) there seemed little doubt that Sandman’s own destiny lay on the big screen, despite Gaiman’s heartfelt belief that, to make the story film-shaped would be “like taking a baby and cutting off both of its arms and one of its legs and nose and trying to cram it in this little box, and filling the rest of the box up with meat.”

One of the first screenplay adaptations was undertaken by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who had helped revive the fortunes of the ailing Walt Disney studio with their screenplay for Aladdin. “After turning in a draft that we felt was pretty good, very true to the book (Neil Gaiman liked it — good enough for me), we were told the script was so bad, the studio considered it undeliverable,” Rossio later told the Coming Attractions website. This meant that Warner Bros felt it was within its rights to refuse delivery of the script, withholding the delivery tranche of Elliott and Rossio’s fee until they had reworked it to the studio’s satisfaction — a response almost unheard of among A-list writers. “I probably should mention [that] between the time we took the assignment and turned it in, [Batman producer] Jon Peters got himself attached as producer,” Rossio added. “Like a parasite. That makes the host sick, and kills it.”

Elliott subsequently wrote a more detailed analysis of his and Rossio’s involvement with the Sandman project for their own website, Word Play. “Since its inception, Terry and I had been fans of The Sandman comic book,” he recalled. “We had told our agent that if anyone ever became interested in an adaptation, we had better be the first writers they meet. And so we were ... We met with Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, the exec on the project, and with the producers, Orin Coolis, Alan Riche and Tony Ludwig. They liked our approach, they commenced us, and so we went to work. We were happy. We were working on a dream project (literally); everyone seemed to want to adhere as closely as possible to the comics; we were certain that we could convey the mood, intelligence, sensibilities and brilliance of Neil’s work. And then darkness fell.” In other words, Peters became attached.

Elliott and Rossio met with Peters, recalling that it took twenty minutes to explain to the producer how Sandman, the King of Dreams, came to be captured. “But we didn’t let it bother us,” Elliott continued. “We knew we were on the right track, and the script would carry the day.” It was only after delivering the first draft the pair learned, through a junior executive, that the studio considered the script undeliverable. “They didn’t want to pay us our completion money; they didn’t want to pay off the rest of our contract; they even maintained that to do so would probably mean the project would be so prohibitively expensive it could never get made.” Elliott and Rossio might have taken the studio’s attitude as an indictment of their screenwriting skills, had they not received, the very same day, a call from Steven Spielberg saying how much he had enjoyed working with the pair on another comic book adaptation, Men in Black, and how much he was enjoying their Mask of Zorro script, which would soon be fast-tracked for production.

As Elliott saw it, the principle problem with their first draft was that it had included Gaiman’s single-issue story ‘A Dream of a Thousand Cats’ — in which an ordinary house cat learns that human subjugation of felines began when a thousand humans dreamed of such a world, and that the reverse could happen if enough cats dream of taking it back — as a means of having the Sandman explain the dangers of the villainous Corinthian’s meddling with the dream realm. “While it was ambitious, it really didn’t work,” Elliott admitted, adding that he and Rossio knew it would be the first thing to go on any subsequent rewrite.[1] Nevertheless, Elliott suggested that the true reason Peters Productions wanted Rossio and Elliott to leave the project was because they had failed to incorporate the producer’s “single, off-the-cuff, and incredibly lame suggestion that a bunch of teenagers at a slumber party holding a séance are the ones that capture Dream.”

While Elliott and Rossio went off to help found two of the biggest franchises of the 21st century with their screenplays for Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean, writer-director Roger Avary, an avowed fan of The Sandman, expressed an interest in directing the film adaptation, and asked Warner Bros to send him Elliott and Rossio’s script. According to Elliott, he read it, and loved it. Given that Avary had won an Oscar co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, the studio wisely figured that he ought to know a good script when he read one. “He went back to Warners,” says Elliott, “and told them they were (in his words) ‘throwing out a diamond’, and insisted that this was the movie he wanted to make. Suddenly, not only was our script ‘deliverable’, it was also now on the fast-track with a director attached.”

Avary subsequently confirmed this version of events on his own website, Avary.com. “[Elliott and Rossio] had been paid a king’s ransom and had delivered what was widely considered, by the WB studio folks, to be a bad script. But I felt that while it wasn’t a hundred per cent there, it was at least written by someone who loved Gaiman’s work and had done him the honour of attempting to stay faithful to his original material. I eagerly told Lorenzo [Di Bonaventura, head of production] that I felt this script simply needed some tailoring and the application of a director’s vision. I also told him that I would be delighted to work with the writers to execute another rewrite of this draft. I subsequently spent the next year overseeing Ted and Terry, and reworking the writing to accommodate my directorial vision. They had already distilled the entire series of comics down to 120 pages (a near impossible task) and they just needed some continued focus to score a goal.”

Drawing largely from the first two Sandman storylines, Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll’s House, and with the meeting of The Endless borrowed from the fourth Sandman story arc, Season of Mists, the Elliott/Rossio/Avary draft opens in the 1930s as Roderick Burgess — the self-styled “wickedest man alive” — sets out to capture Death, but ensnares instead her younger brother, Dream. Years pass; Roderick grows old, leaving Dream in the care of his son, Alex. When Death comes to claim Roderick, she sees her brother for the first time in fifty years, but is powerless to help him. Finally, the circle is broken and Morpheus escapes. He returns to the dream realm to find his palace in ruins. His older brother, Destiny, summons Dream and his siblings Death, Delirium and Desire (forming a Hecateae-like triptych), who persuade Dream to restore his kingdom. To do this, he must retrieve his three powerful symbols of office: a pouch of sand, a helm and a ruby.

Retrieving the pouch is easy enough: it remains in the care of a woman named Rachel — here, ingeniously, a former girlfriend of Roderick Burgess (rather than fellow DC-owned character John Constantine, whose own feature film destiny lay elsewhere) — the mother of a young insomniac named Rose Walker. Next, the Sandman goes to Hell to retrieve his helm (almost exactly as in the comics, except that he meets Roderick there, suffering for his sins). Finally, he must collect his ruby, which is in the hands of the Corinthian, a nightmare personified, with teeth where his eyes should be, who has been terrorising the real world since escaping the dream realm two decades earlier, when a Vortex created a disturbance.

The Vortex turns out to be Rose, who is herself half dream, because Rachel had, while in possession of the pouch of sand, conjured a father for her child. The Sandman knows he must kill Rose to protect the dream realm, but before he can do so, the Corinthian turns up with the ruby, which harbours enough of the Sandman’s power to ensure the Corinthian’s victory. He kidnaps Rose, taking her to a convention of serial killers with the intention of sacrificing her, but when he destroys the ruby, the Sandman’s stored power is released, allowing him to destroy the Corinthian. The Sandman is still forced to kill Rose to protect the dream realm, but before Death claims her, he grants her a final dream, in which she sits by the Sandman’s side as the Dream-King’s queen.

‘Widgett’, a senior scooper and script commentator for Coming Attractions, described the script as “one of the best I’ve read in quite some time, due to its ability to adapt a very complicated storyline for the screen and yet not lose anything crucial in the process. Unbelievably, they managed to add things as well, and do so in a way that did not seem ‘tacked on’ or forced.” Although one might question the validity of one such creation, a love interest for Rose (albeit a Platonic one) in the shape of a tormented artist named Paul, Widgett singled out another which spoke volumes about Rossio and Elliott’s ability to capture Gaiman’s style: “When Sandman looks in a mirror [after Rose’s death] he catches a glimpse of Despair who promptly says, ‘I don’t want you in here.’ They are additions,” Widgett noted, “but done correctly so that if you haven’t read the comic books lately, you think, ‘Wait? Was that in the original?’” Similarly, Gaiman, when asked by the website Cold Print what he thought of the scripts he had read, said, “It’s very hard to dislike them because there’ll be these 110-page-long scripts and I wrote ninety-five of those pages in one form or another at one time or another. [Although] not necessarily in that order.”

Following Rossio and Elliott’s departure, Avary wrote his own draft of the Sandman script, which, he said, “kept the basic structure that they had created, but refined some of their more ‘Hollywood-ish’ ideas. Ted and Terry are incredibly gifted writers,” he added, “but what the script really needed was a director’s vision. I tinkered with almost every scene to reflect exactly what the film would look like.” Aside from relocating the action to San Francisco, placing Alex Burgess in Madonna’s former home in the Hollywood Hills, and making the Corinthian Rose’s father, Avary’s draft wisely removed Rose’s love interest, Paul, but added a first person voiceover from Morpheus which fans may have found unappealing. Avary also throws in a dialogue line suggesting that the dominance of the dream realm had been sublimated in the Sandman’s absence by “a thing called Hollywood [which] has grown to consume the dream-hungry Earthworld. People now look to a box called television to fill the broken void.”

“He made some interesting changes,” Elliott said of Avary’s version. “We don’t agree with all of them, but it’s a very viable, very solid draft.” Nevertheless, in January 1997, it was widely reported that Avary had pulled out of the Sandman project due to what the website Coming Attractions described as “creative differences with the Peters Company — apparently they wanted a Sandman in tights and a cape punching out The Corinthian.” Avary, writing on his own website, offered his own explanation: “I incorporated a concept that would ultimately result in my leaving the project over creative issues with Jon Peters.” The concept was the rendering of several dream sequences in the rough film-making style of Czechoslovakian animator Jan Svankmajer, described in the script as “a strange nightmare that’s a lucid cross between the visions of [Sandman cover artist] Dave McKean and Jan Svankmajer.” Despite the fact that Avary had shown a “very enthusiastic” Lorenzo Di Bonaventura his references — Svankmajer’s Alice and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby — “everyone at the studio feigned ignorance when Jon Peters nixed my vision. It was like I had crawled out on this creative limb and when I looked around all of my supporters were gone and Jon-fucking-Peters was sawing the branch off.”

Avary further noted that, as producer of Batman, Peters had famously fought with director Tim Burton against the darker tone Burton preferred, and which had not prevented the film from grossing a record-breaking $400 million worldwide. Peters, Avary suggested, “views Sandman as his next Batman meal ticket, and while Sandman has its dark elements, it’s not Batman — at least, not with me at the helm. With me, Sandman would have had its own distinct look and feel. But look and feel wasn’t the worrisome issue with me; it was that Jon Peters wanted the Sandman in tights beating the life out of the Corinthian (on page 1). When I brought up the fact that the Sandman would never raise his fists like a brute and cold-cock someone, I was asked if I wanted to make the movie or not.” Avary’s response? Not. “So a year of my life vanished like dreams into the air (did I mention that I made nothing for my writing services? Multiple drafts, all for free. So much for idealism). I wish them all well and hope that they make the movie they want to make. Just don’t look for me in line on opening day — I can’t stand to see Neil’s baby, who I consider my godchild, barbecued.”

“I watched Sandman, my great epic comics opus, go through traditional development hell,” Gaiman later told Neil Rosser, producer of a BBC Radio documentary adapted from the first edition of this book, “beginning with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the great writers who did Pirates of the Caribbean and such, doing these really very good drafts of a script which the producer at the time, Jon Peters, famously did not ‘get’. Roger Avary was brought on as director and he did a draft of their script, again it was very good, he went in, he showed them Jan Svankmayer’s Alice and said, ‘I want the dreamy sequences to look like this,’ and was fired. And then scripts came in and they got worse and worse.”

Following Avary’s departure, a new writer was brought aboard to start over: William Farmer, who had impressed the Sandman producers with his (then unproduced) script adaptation of another comic book, Jonah Hex.[2]
Although a fan of Jonah Hex, Farmer admits he wasn’t at all familiar with The Sandman. “I read the graphic novel called Preludes & Nocturnes, and some of the comics,” he says. “I found them to be very imaginative but undisciplined, as comics often are. I don’t mean that to be condescending. What I mean by that is, comics are generally free to take flights of fancy without the cumbersome weight of a three-act structure, since the story can presumably just go on and on and on. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s what the medium calls for. But it’s not a movie.

“I was working for Jon Peters’ company,” he adds, “though I only met the man in passing. I’m sure he had no idea what was going on with the story and didn’t care. The producers were Alan Riche and Tony Ludwig, who went on to do Mouse Hunt and Deep Blue Sea. But they weren’t really involved in the story development; they were basically just standing by listening to story conferences, trying to decide how much the thing was going to cost, where to shoot it — practical production concerns. The actual story executives I was working with on a day-to-day basis I won’t name. They know who they are. They’re parts in a machine, and I’m sure they’ve all gone on to take different slots in other machines by now.

“Basically, it was clear from the start that the goal of the project was to take the Sandman name and use it as a franchise, while making the actual story something more ‘for the masses’. So I was essentially brought in to do a whole new story that would simply be called Sandman.” Farmer read the most recent draft, by Roger Avary, which he found “interesting, but in the studio’s opinion — and I must admit, in mine as well — absolutely unfilmable. A very twisted and surreal kind of thing you might have been able to do in the ’70s, not the ’90s. No studio would have touched that version. I had some ideas that were very loyal to the source material,” he explains, “yet would tweak things here and there to make it more of an audience picture. But there were things the producers wanted done with it that took it in a different direction, and as I was a fledgling screenwriter, I figured you take the suggestions of the ones writing the cheques.” This, he admits, turned out to be a mistake — personally and for the project.

“Things were forced into it that really didn’t belong there,” he explains. “The producers were adamant that the coming Millennium must play a big role. Every film in development at that time had some damn thing to do with the Millennium. Of course this was folly, as the Millennium turned out to be no big deal, in the real world or in film — nobody really gave a shit. So it was a case of trying to bring my ‘vision’ to the project, but the range of that vision was squeezed into an increasingly narrow field by things the producers insisted must be in there. For example, one executive producer insisted, for reasons I’ll never understand, that there be a scene of Morpheus in a rave club. Don’t ask me why. There was no place for it and I can say with a tiny amount of pride that I at least refused to write that one.”

At one point, Farmer recalls positing the idea of meeting with Neil Gaiman to discuss things. “The reply was basically, ‘Nah, we don’t need to get him involved.’” Besides, as Gaiman told Ain’t It Cool News in 1998, “Where The Sandman movie is concerned, I’d rather not get involved. No one should be made to barbecue their own baby.” Farmer says that he wrote several drafts between 1997 and 1998. “When all was said and done, and we had the definite draft of my involvement, they were ecstatic. They were talking about a big franchise, this thing would be huge, blah blah blah... Of course everyone knew the source material had been massacred, but nobody really cared. It wasn’t about that, it was about a product name.”

While Farmer’s approach found favour with the producers and the studio, Sandman fans felt their worst nightmares were coming true when a review of his script appeared on Ain’t It Cool News, written by ‘Moriarty’. “Mistake number one: the whole thing is tied to the Millennium,” he wrote. “That’s rapidly becoming one of the most heinous, preposterous clichés in film. Stop it. By the time you get this thing finished and in theaters, even if you started right now, the year 1999 will essentially be over... The best quality of Gaiman’s work is its timelessness. Don’t make the mistake of grafting some momentary gimmick onto what’s already so good. Mistake number two: did you actually read any issues of the book, Mr Farmer, or were you doing the evil bidding of Jon Peters himself? And if the answer is the latter, then tell me, does Mr Peters in fact have horns and cloven hooves? The soft skull’s a given, but I’m trying to figure out if he has any real malice in his heart. After all, he’s currently working overtime to destroy one of America’s finest icons, Superman, and now he’s actively mauling one of the few examples of true graphic literature. This is one of those cases where changes are made for the sake of making changes, as a matter of ego, and not for any sort of sound dramatic reasons.”

Moriarty went on to summarise Farmer’s story outline: “Rose Kendall is the daughter of wealthy industrialist and all around Really Famous Wacko Harlan Kendall. When she was very young, her father used her in some nutty experiment in which he killed her, opened the Dream Gate, captured Dream, then brought her back to life. In doing so, he also managed to take the ruby, the bag of sand, and the helmet. So far — well, it’s at least vaguely recognizable. The Kendalls are new, but at least we’ve got Morpheus imprisoned and the icons of his office being scattered. Rose is afflicted with lifelong nightmares in which the man from her dreams asks to be released. Finally, just a few days before the Millennium, Rose is attacked by someone yelling about the Nightmare Man. She’s taken to a hospital where she has an encounter with someone vaguely like Gaiman’s Death (although with far more ‘zany’ wisecracks) and an ‘Angel’ appears, coming through from another world when Rose dies briefly on the table. Nice how she keeps doing that, eh? He takes away her nightmares and disappears.

“Back at the building her father built, there’s some sort of construction going on and the secret magic chamber where Kendall stuck Morpheus is found and blown up, releasing Morpheus. And here’s where things really go wrong, since the character that is released is a fairly indiscriminate killer with no real power of any kind. He beats some people up, jumps off something, gets hurt, and gets taken to the hospital. Morpheus. Lord of Dreams. Gets taken to a hospital after yelling tripe like, ‘As though your puny weapons could harm Morpheus! The lord of sleep! The Sandman!’” (Farmer subsequently contacted the website Comics 2 Film to deny the claim: “The horrible line ... has NEVER been typed by the fingers of yours truly,” and declare that “this was not at all the tone of my script for Warners.”)

“Well, of course the hospital that Morpheus is brought to just happens to be the same one Rose is in,” Moriarty continued, “and suddenly we’re in lame Terminator 2 rip-off country, with Morpheus going to look for Rose, and the Angel appearing again to save her. The twist here is that Morpheus is trying to kill Rose to save the world, while the Angel is actually The Corinthian, Morpheus’ brother, who has bet Lucifer, their other brother, that he can find the icons of Dream’s office first. Whoever gets them before the year 2000 wins. If neither does, then Lucifer takes over the earth for torture, misery, sorrow, yadda, yadda, yadda. Really. That’s really the story. And the rest of the film’s just a dumb action film with these two fighting over and over, and with them beating up people to get the various items. The ruby’s in a safe in a pawn shop. The sand’s in the study of Rose’s house. And the helmet? Well... giggle, giggle... dare I say it? It’s hidden inside Rose!”

Perhaps understandably, Moriarty took umbrage at what he saw as the wholesale reinterpretation — or, at best, misunderstanding — of Gaiman’s magnum opus. The Corinthian and Lucifer as Morpheus’ brothers? A character called Love as his sister? And an ending in which it was all just a dream? “Gaiman never, never cheated us like that. Even if something happened in a dream, it mattered. It counted. That’s the whole point. Our dream lives and our waking lives are one and the same. One affects the other. Gaiman made the point over and over, and Farmer has ignored it utterly.” Although Farmer had created a ‘nightmare plague’ loosely based on the ’24 Hours’ issue of Preludes & Nocturnes, Moriarty dismissed the idea as “nothing but a bunch of pointless atrocities without moral heft or payoff.” Overall, he added, “[Farmer] misses everything that makes the original work so unique, so special, so brilliant.”

Gaiman agreed, describing Farmer’s script as “the worst one yet. It was just sort of nonsensical, poorly written trash,” he told the Philadelphia City Paper. “These are not people who particularly care about Sandman,” he added. “They want it to be the new Batman & Robin, which is a little like deciding you want to make David Copperfield the new Batman & Robin.” To Andy Mangels, Gaiman claimed that the script was “not only the worst Sandman script so far, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read. That was sad, especially when it’s something like Sandman which you love and you’ve been close to all these years and then you read this nonsense.” Speaking with the BBC’s Neil Rosser, Gaiman added: “Films carry with them a certain amount of fear because if you say ‘Yes’ to something and you’re wrong, you’re out on your ear, whereas if you say ‘No’ to something, you’re never going to get into trouble, [especially] if everything is always defensible. So you wind up in development with people trying to make things more like things they know, because that is a defensible position: you will probably not get fired for it. Unfortunately that’s why you wind up with films that look like other films.”

Gaiman wasn’t sure what to make of the latest script. “It was very obvious that whoever wrote it had never read any Sandman, and had no understanding of what it was about, and basically had sat somewhere while people said, ‘This is what we want this thing to be,’” he recalls. “It was so offensive and stupid that when the people from Jon Peters’ office phoned me, I found myself being honest with them in a way that you never are with Hollywood people because they don’t like honesty and they don’t quite know how to deal with it. I said ‘I thought it was awful, actually.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the thing we did where we made the Corinthian character the Sandman’s brother, you must have thought that was great.’ And I said, ‘No, that was one of the most deeply stupid things, one of the many awful things...’ and told them for a while how bad I thought it was without repeating myself or stopping for breath for about fifteen minutes, and at the end of it they put down the phone and I thought to myself that’s the last time they’ll ever send me a script or tell me what was going on, and it was indeed. I think they figured I wasn’t a team player and didn’t ‘get’ that whole Sandman thing.”

Farmer responded to Gaiman’s public trashing of his screenplay by contacting the website Coming Attractions with an appeal to Sandman fans: “If any of you are waiting for Mr Gaiman’s esoteric ‘opus’ to arrive on screen intact, forget it,” he wrote. “A hardcore gaggle of fans would no doubt attend, but hardly enough to support the $100 mil budget that would doubtless be required. The best that can be hoped for is a reworking of the source material which retains the concepts, but makes them more accessible to a mainstream audience. I feel that my script was successful in this endeavour; it’s unfortunate Mr Gaiman doesn’t agree.” Suggesting that Gaiman was unlikely to be satisfied with any screenplay which the studio might consider produceable, he added: “I did my best, only to join five or six others in the growing ranks of the ‘Screenwriters of Sandman’ club. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not this troubled project ever gets off the ground. And just to set the record straight,” he concluded, “my version of Sandman didn’t have one fistfight in it.”

Farmer now says that he has “mixed feelings” about the Internet trashing of his script: “I couldn’t blame Sandman fans for being upset; of course this was how they would react. But the personal nature of the attacks was a little un-called for, in my opinion. Gaiman used the word ‘idiot’ in one interview I read, and said that the script was not only the worst Sandman [script], but the worst screenplay of any kind he had ever read. I can of course understand the former statement, but the latter was a little harsh. Taken on its own, the script was intelligent and well written, if I do say so myself. Of course it mangled Sandman; I would never argue that.” Farmer says that he would probably have been hurt more by the attacks if he had believed in the script himself; as it was, “I never really considered it ‘my script’. It was a big monster written by committee, and I just happened to be the schmuck being paid to make the whole thing read like a script and sign my name to it. So while I did not exactly like being called names, I couldn’t very well get on the Internet and say, ‘Hey, you guys are wrong! This thing is great and we didn’t mangle Sandman!’ Because of course, we did.

“The only time I countered anything was when I read an angry review of the script on a popular film-gossip site that I won’t honour by naming. The reviewer ranted on and on about how stupid it was, and how stupid I was for having created it. Then, to demonstrate how bad it was, he included the first page. And guess what? I had never seen that page before. It was obviously a script written by a fan-boy or something, that had been circulated on the Internet as the ‘official’ Warner Bros script. So I tried to set the record straight, but by the time I stumbled across this site the controversy had already died down, anyway.”

Following the Internet backlash, little was heard from the producers. “I think right now they’re licking their wounds,” Gaiman told Andy Mangels. “They got laughed at rather more heartily than they expected for their last idiot script.” As Farmer recalls, “A few weeks went by with the buzz that it was about to go into pre-production, then I got a call saying they were going to look for another writer, with no explanation why. Later I realized it was probably due to the Internet reaction — which is a silly attitude if you think about it. They’re perfectly willing to destroy the source material and piss off the fans, but if the fans find out about it ahead of time, they pull the plug. There was also some talk about an option on the DC source material coming up, so the idea was in the air that Gaiman had pulled it somehow. But I never found out if that was indeed the case.” Gaiman, for the record, denied this possibility. “Warners own Sandman outright; always have done,” he told Ain’t It Cool News. “DC Comics owned all rights back in the days when I signed the original contract with them. Obviously Roger [Avary] couldn’t have taken the rights away to shop around. Nor could I.”

For Farmer, in addition to earning him a great deal of money and — for a time, at least — kudos from the producers who had hired him and the studio which paid him, his involvement with the Sandman project also taught him a valuable lesson. “If someone hires you to write something, then presumably they think you can write better than they can; otherwise they’d just do it themselves,” he points out. “So, rather than do what you’re told, you’re far better off doing what you believe is best. Had I done that with Sandman, I might still have created a version that didn’t get produced, but at least I would have kept my personal dignity intact. Because at the end of the day, the only one who’ll get the blame for the script is the writer. Sandman was a project that no studio should have tried to do,” he adds. “It was doomed to fail. Now, after all is said and done, everyone involved in that failure can simply say, ‘It was Farmer’s fault.’ In hindsight, it’s clear that this was the sole purpose for which I was hired.” In other words, he says, “Live and learn.”

Following the Farmer débâcle, two years passed before anything of substance emerged regarding the Sandman project, although for a time the Internet was rife with casting speculation, mostly from fans. “They always have ideas for casting,” Gaiman told the website Cold Print. “It’s one of the immutable laws of the universe now — if you get two Sandman fans together in an enclosed space for more than fifteen minutes, one starts saying, ‘So, if you were doing a Sandman movie, who would you have play him?’ And the other would say, ‘Oh, Daniel Day-Lewis.’ And the first one says, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and they go off from there.” Gaiman had already written to Ain’t It Cool News dismissing as “silliness” the rumours that Stand by Me star Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher) had been cast as Morpheus, and noted that when he had last been consulted on the project — during the period of Roger Avary’s attachment — he did not recall the director having named a favourite actor for the role, “although he mentioned a number of people, including Daniel Day-Lewis, David Thewlis and Rufus Sewell as people he’d be interested in. All English actors.” As ever, Gaiman refused to be drawn on his own dream casting, although he did talk to actress Fairuza Balk (The Craft) about the possibility of an adaptation of his Sandman spin-off comic book miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living. Gaiman, thinking that he may want to direct the film himself, even made a practice run with a short film based on a story by his Books of Magic collaborator, artist John Bolton.

It was not until the dawn of the new Millennium that a new screenwriter became attached to the Sandman project. David J. Schow was one of the revolutionary horror writers to have emerged around the same time as Clive Barker, and who, along with John Skipp, Craig Spector, Ray Garton and others, was part of the ‘splatterpunk’ movement which tore away the last taboos in horror, writing the kind of works that made James Herbert look like Barbara Cartland. When he turned to screenwriting in the early 1990s, one of his first assignments was adapting J. M. O’Barr’s tragic comic book The Crow for director Alex Proyas. Says Schow, “I was approached by Brian Manis of Peters Entertainment in June of 2000. He had several script drafts and a whole raft of treatments, all in pursuit of what the studio wanted, which was ‘a more commercial approach’ [to the material]. What that means, who can really say? I immediately contacted Neil Gaiman to get his pre-approval, or at least his sanction, for any damage I might wreak on his creation, and Neil basically said, ‘You’re free to try anything you want.’ He insisted that I read the Avary-Elliott-Rossio draft and made sure I received ‘the whole of The Sandman’ — ten books. That was my first exposure to the material.”

Schow received no notes from the producers prior to commencing work on his ‘pitch’. “I was left pretty much to free-range,” he says. “In retrospect, I realise this was because they had a number of writers working on a number of approaches simultaneously, which isn’t uncommon.” As well as getting up to speed on ten volumes of The Sandman comics, Schow undertook what he calls a “breakdown read” of an undated draft of an earlier Sandman script credited solely to Elliott and Rossio. The draft was not bad, he felt, “just diffuse — it tried to cram in too many characters and incidents from the source book. It seemed arcane, mannered, and discursive, with no actual characters until about halfway in.” In addition, he felt that the script suffered from a problem endemic to comic book adaptations: a pressing desire to tell the ‘origin’ story. “Ever since Superman and Batman established the ‘template’ for [comic book] adaptations,” he observes, “studios have become obsessed with ‘origin’ stories they hope to parlay into series franchises. Well, in most endeavours, the origin buries the story. Story becomes secondary and, voilà, no franchise. This has happened more times than I can count. So if The Sandman was to follow the origin-story route, I felt the origin had to be secondary, or better yet, left for another movie. If the first movie is confusing, or no good, there won’t be a franchise. I think the emphasis on the Sandman’s origin is what jumped the script off the rails in the first place.”

Schow’s approach was to tell a more focused story. “Face it, the source material ran to nearly a thousand pages,” he says. “So I reduced the players, basically, to four: Sandman, Death, Corinthian, and a normal human character I invented, named Grace, who suffers from every sleep disorder known to science. Grace’s mother was essentially Rachel from the comic, and her link to Sandman. She’s also blood-linked to Corinthian, hence, all kinds of conflict. Once Grace and Sandman are paired up, we experience the horrible wrongness of Corinthian, we quest for the recovery of the Sandman’s power objects, we visit Hell, we meet The Endless, and Sandman battles Corinthian in the dream realm, then the fight slops over into the real world.”

For Schow, equally important to doing justice to the story, and Gaiman’s writing, was to capture the tone of the comic book. “The triumph of the comic is its melancholy tone, its atmospherics, its emotional resonance,” he explains, “not the chapter-and-verse on who came from where. I wrote for this tone. Corinthian is turning all the world’s dreams into nightmares, and needs to drive Grace to suicide to accomplish his programme. Sandman must regain his lost tools and reinstate himself as one of The Endless. He’s even forced to sleep like a normal human, in order to gain access to the dream realm, and this moment of frailty, of course, undoes him. Grace has to find Sandman in the dream realm, basically, without a map. But the rules of The Endless have only caused Sandman suffering and grief. Grace tells him, ‘Don’t save the world. Save me.’ And, wham — third act. It was very bleak, but uplifting in the way of a single candle flame in darkness. I could tell you more,” he adds with glee, “but you would be driven totally insane.”

Schow worked on his treatment for a month, between June and July 2000. “I didn’t write a script,” he says. “I wrote two fleshed-out and fairly detailed treatments. Then, game over. And I was never paid a dime.” After that, he says, “It descended back into the dream realm-type limbo where it remains to this day, because there is no Sandman — at least, not one powerful enough to rescue all of us from studio executives.” Despite the lack of a screenplay commission, Schow looks back fondly on his month in the dream realm. “I loved twisting and turning Neil’s clay,” he says, “and still think it would make a great movie. And I hope Neil does, too.”

Gaiman, however, was not so sure. “I couldn’t quite see why they got him to do what they did, having seen his outline,” he says. “The powers that be had already thrown out the Jon Peters/William Farmer script and plot approach and decided (at the time) to go back to the Avary draft, so I suspected that Dave Schow was just an attempt by the Jon Peters people to prove that their approach really would work.”

A year after Schow’s brief sojourn with the project, the website Universo HQ quoted Gaiman as saying that he had received another outline “for another [version of the] movie a lot like the really bad one. It’s always the same. They want a love interest now, for the Sandman. They want the Corinthian to be the big bad guy. He’s like the Sandman only more powerful. And they want them to fight, and for the Corinthian to menace to kidnap his girlfriend. It’s just stupid.” Little has been heard of the stalled Sandman project since what Gaiman has described as “the strange, sad, Development Hell morass that Jon Peters has thrown it into... With any luck it will remain there forever. I would much rather that a Sandman movie were never made, than that a bad Sandman movie was.”

If Sandman is ever granted a reprieve from Development Hell, Gaiman has said, “I just desperately hope that it’s a good movie. I don’t have any control over it, so I’d much rather keep it at a distance and keep my fingers crossed.” Perhaps, he has suggested, Sandman’s destiny lies on the small screen. “I would love Sandman as a television series. I think it would be wonderful. But I don’t think that it will ever happen. They have been doing these drafts of the script and they have been getting worse and worse and they have fired anybody who did have a clue. My own hope is that some time in my lifetime you’ll get a director who loved Sandman and wants to make it, in the same way that Sam Raimi made Spider-Man or Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings.”

In the meantime, Gaiman takes his occasional glimpses behind the Hollywood curtain in his stride. “My assumption with things in Hollywood is that it is ‘Looking-Glass Land’; everything is upside-down and madness, and the odds of anything happening in Hollywood is small. They buy 18-30 projects for any one thing that actually makes it through the system and comes out, so I always thought they would need to buy at least 18 of my things before anything got made, and the fact that I have had Stardust, Beowulf and Coraline actually get made [means] I’m doing incredibly well.”

So well, in fact, that Warner Bros eventually began to pay attention to Gaiman himself, not only as the author of the original work, but as a potential architect for the comic book’s screen adaptation, by then no longer in the hands of Jon Peters. Despite previous reservations about the possibility of barbecuing his own baby, Gaiman walked once more into the Hollywood threshing machine, albeit with eyes wide open. “We’d had all these paintings done so we could talk them through the storyline of the ten volumes of Sandman,” he says. “We had all the dolls, the statues, the things that have been made so that was there in front of them, and I did a two-hour presentation, and I remember sitting down and one of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Neil, that was very interesting. We went out for lunch recently and we figured that we’d worked out why the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, which are our two biggest hits of the last few years, were such successes, and we figured it out: it’s because they have clearly defined bad guys. Has Sandman got a clearly defined bad guy?’ And I said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ And they said, ‘It was great seeing you,’ and I walked out. And that was the last thing I ever heard about Sandman.”

_____________

1 This notion of including a ‘sacrificial lamb’ in a screenplay is not uncommon, because screenwriters know that studio personnel who write ‘coverage’ of scripts for their executive bosses always like to have things they can single out which they feel don’t work in a script, much as surveyors like to draw attention to minor flaws in a building to show they’ve done their jobs properly.

2
Jonah Hex, released in 2010, was one of the biggest box office flops of the year.

CRISIS ON THE HOT ZONE

How Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Richard Preston bestseller failed to survive an Outbreak

“We had Redford, Ridley Scott and a script in progress. That’s a lot to have. But instead of making it better, that just made everyone push to do a Hollywood number instead of an intelligent, thoughtful and honest film.”

— The Hot Zone screenwriter Richard Friedenberg

In 1992, journalist Richard Preston was researching article ideas for The New Yorker magazine when he stumbled across what was to become one of the biggest stories of the decade. His original intention had been to write about viruses, but while the AIDS epidemic seemed the logical choice, a lot had already been written on the subject; instead, he asked Professor Joshua Lederberg at New York’s Rockerfeller University if he knew of any other ‘interesting’ viruses. “He mentioned Ebola,” Preston recalled, referring to the lethal and incurable filovirus which kills nine out of ten of those infected — liquefying their internal organs and causing them to haemorrhage through every orifice. “He said there’d been a frightening outbreak of Ebola near Washington a few years earlier, which had been dealt with by the US Army — by soldiers wearing space suits, killing monkeys. He added, ‘Well, you probably know about it.’ I said, ‘God, no! How do I learn more?’” Lederberg suggested that Preston call the Army, which he did. “Eventually I got permission to interview the Army officers who’d led the Ebola mission. Among them were Colonels Jerry and Nancy Jaax, husband and wife.”

The result, published in October 1992, was an article entitled ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’, detailing the seemingly superhuman efforts of the two USAMRIID (US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) virologists to contain an outbreak of the virus, which had not only travelled from the African rainforest to the eastern seaboard of the United States, but also jumped species from monkeys to humans. If it was not contained, it threatened to become a worldwide pandemic, a so-called ‘slate wiper’ for the human race. Since the tiniest tear in the Jaax’s biohazard suits could have resulted in a swift and horrible demise, they lived and worked in a state of constant paranoia, and put their lives at risk throughout the entire endeavour. “In [my] very first interview with Nancy Jaax, she told me the story of how she’d gotten a leak in her space suit,” Preston said later, “and her glove had filled up with Ebola blood, while she’d had a cut on her hand. It was a gripping story.” The fact that the pair was married — and that Nancy had, at the time, outranked her husband — only made the story more thrilling. That it was also true... well, that was almost too good to be true. No sooner had the article been published in The New Yorker than Hollywood was on the phone.

In fact, it was on 18 January 1993 that Preston told the teenager babysitting his two children that he was going to work in his garage office and did not wish to be disturbed. Moments later, Hollywood heavyweight Arnold Kopelson — producer of such hits as Platoon, The Fugitive and, most recently, Falling Down — was on the line, prefacing the conversation with the to-the-point question: “Do you know who I am?” As Kopelson explained to Entertainment Weekly, “I want people to know I’m a serious film-maker; I’m an Academy Award-winner.” Preston recalled, “I don’t know if he had a cigar in his mouth, but I think he did. You could almost hear the faint sucking sound in the background. He said, ‘First of all, call me Arnold. How are you, anyway?’ and I said, ‘I’m fine,’ and he said, without missing a beat, ‘I’m terrific,’ and I thought, sitting there in my garage, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Hollywood.’” Kopelson went on to say that he wanted the rights to ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. He told Preston he wanted to make an important movie that would effect social change. He was passionate to make the movie. He wanted to spend money on it — indeed, he claimed never to make a film for less than $50 million. “By the way,” Kopelson added, somewhat ominously, “we have the lawyers’ opinion that we can make this movie without you.”

Unbeknown to Preston, Kopelson had already been working with screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool on a screen version of events similar to those detailed in Preston’s article. This was possible because facts are generally considered to be in the ‘public domain’, and since no one can own them, anyone can exploit them for dramatic effect, as long as the names of real life people are not involved, or if they are, their ‘life rights’ are purchased. Dworet and Pool’s first stab at the screenplay was, Kopelson said later, “totally unsatisfactory”. Warner Bros, with which Kopelson had a production output deal, wanted a grittier thriller, and hired Academy Award-winner Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) to tackle the next draft. Kopelson says that his initial plan had been to hire Preston as a consultant on a film that would be based only loosely on the article, but use it as the backdrop to a more dramatic, fictionalised account of an outbreak. “[The article] wasn’t a movie, it was merely background,” the producer explained. “It was about 100 monkeys, and all of them end up getting killed. First of all, I would have the animal rights activists all over me. Secondly, it did not have a beginning, a middle and an end.” According to Preston, however, the rights to the article were auctioned off, with producer Lynda Obst (The Fisher King) emerging the victor, paying $100,000, with a proviso that a further $350,000 be payable on the first day of production.

“Fox and I had won the initial skirmish by convincing Preston of our sympathetic intentions,” Obst later wrote in her memoir, Hello, He Lied. “He had elected to interview all the interested producers and choose from among them.” As a former reporter, Obst was attracted to the true story; as a working mother, she was attracted to Nancy Jaax’s heroism. “We did not want to make an exploitative horror film. Credible argument. We won the auction. Credible victory. That was the last moment any of it made any sense.” Kopelson maintains that no such auction took place. “On my life, the lives of my children, my wife, and everything that is dear to me, there was no auction,” he insisted, stating that Preston merely rejected his offer — a suggestion which Preston dismissed as “baloney”.

The fact remained, however: Obst had beaten Kopelson to the rights. “To our astonishment,” said Obst, “the losing producer from Warner Bros decided to proceed regardless of the fact that he had lost the auction. His idea was to make his own knock-off version of the Preston article.” As Kopelson explained, “I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like to lose.” Thus, while Obst set The Hot Zone up at 20th Century Fox, Kopelson continued to develop his rival version — originally titled Pandora, a reference to the Greek myth about a box containing all the evils of the world. So closely related were the two projects that when Obst and Preston travelled to Fort Detrick, Maryland, to meet Jerry and Nancy Jaax, they were astonished to discover that Kopelson and one of his screenwriters, Laurence Dworet, had just left. According to Preston, Nancy Jaax had greeted Kopelson with the following: “Number one, get your goddamn limo out of my parking space. And another thing, if there’s a female colonel who looks like me in [your] movie, there’s going to be a major lawsuit.”

While Kopelson continued working on his version, now retitled Outbreak, Obst was expected to hire screenwriting/producing partners Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), who had originally brought the article to the attention of Fox senior vice president of production, Michael London. When they were not available, Obst called in screenwriter James V. Hart (Hook, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) — with whom she had been working for some time on an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact — to write the first draft.

“I had just finished Contact for Lynda Obst at Warner Bros,” Hart recalls, “which had been a two-and-a-half-year process with Carl Sagan and his wife. I was fired immediately off the project when I turned the script in [because] the head of the studio hated it. So although there was no reason to bring it to me, having just been fired from Contact and my draft genuinely being hated by the head of the studio, Lynda to her credit came to me [with The Hot Zone]. I think she knew that the science problems were not frightening to me, that I actually enjoy that challenge.” His mission, he says, was simple: “‘Go tell this story, but find great characters.’”

Hart began by meeting everyone he could who had been involved with the incidents detailed in Preston’s article. “I spent time with all of them,” he says. “And as soon as you meet Nancy, you just go straight to her. Even though in reality her husband was the leader of the team that led the investigation and also went into the monkey house in Reston, Virginia, Nancy emerges as the most interesting character: she’s a housewife, she raises all kinds of animals, they have a daughter who is a spectacular gymnast. Once you take her outside the spacesuit and put her in a car driving home, she’s a commuting housewife, yet every day she went in and dealt with the deadliest diseases known to man. We had not seen that before. You put a military guy in a spacesuit, that’s easy. The hard thing was making Nancy Jaax the centre of the story, and for me that was the most fun about this: finding a way to make this great female character work.”

Hart recalls only three mandates from the studio. The first was that the good guys must win in the end. “Of course,” says Hart, “every virologist you talk to will say, ‘You don’t win — you just manage to put the genie back in the bottle until the next one pops out.’” The second was to “scare the shit out of people,” he says. “Tom Jacobson, who was running Fox at the time, said, ‘Make the virus as scary as the shark in Jaws.’ So we were able to do that, because [these people] had enormous reverence for the viruses, and when they talk about them it’s like they’re talking about a great work of art; what incredible, soulless, beautiful creations they are, and how powerful the microbe is against all society, against all our technology, everything we can create as Mankind — this one microbe doesn’t give a shit.” The third mandate would be the toughest of all: “Tom Jacobson said, ‘You’ve got to deliver a script fast because we’re in a race, there’s another project called Outbreak.’ At that point I thought there was some protection — I still think they did — because they had bought a copyrighted article and paid a lot of money for it, and Richard had done all this work. So I had ten weeks to do the research, do the outline, and write the script. Ten weeks. Tom Jacobson said, ‘That’s all I can give you, and you’ve got to hit it out of the park on the first draft. We’ve got to know there’s a movie there — we don’t have time to guess.’”

Hart began his research in April 1993. In June, he sent his wife and two young children away for the summer, moved into a converted barn in upstate New York, and set to work on the script, conferring with Lynda Obst and her associates Lynn Harris and Dean Georgaris (with whom, years later, Hart would share credit on the script for Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life). At the time, Preston had yet to turn his article into the ‘non-fiction novel’, The Hot Zone, which would become one of the hottest bestsellers of 1994. “There was no book at that time,” says Hart, “all there was was the article in The New Yorker, which was a fantastic article. Richard Preston was writing the book as I was writing the screenplay, so I was on the phone every day to Richard, and to Nancy Jaax and her husband. It was amazing — it was like having your own lab at your fingertips. They were all encouraging me to fictionalise the story to make the point. The problem was, [the story] had no third act, and the big climax was killing monkeys, and there were no bad guys. Who are the bad guys in that scenario? You don’t make the monkey handlers the bad guys. They were doing their job — they didn’t intentionally bring Ebola into this country, like a terrorist act. The CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] and USAMRIID are not the bad guys — they have bureaucracy, but they’re out there trying to save the world, not destroy it.” The solution was simple yet brilliant: “It was the virus. The bad guy was the virus itself.”

An equally tough challenge was finding the drama in the story of an outbreak of a deadly virus in which not a single person died. “The lethal Ebola virus that came to this country did not kill one human being,” Hart states. “In my research, I went to USAMRIID, I spent a very intense week with Nancy Jaax and her husband, and everybody who worked at USAMRIID, and to a person, the biggest problem — and I want to make sure this is said right — the biggest problem they had with the Ebola outbreak at the monkey house was the fact that no human being died. If one human being had died, it would have moved their cause for prevention and preparation for these kinds of outbreaks forward in the government’s mind — that it was a real threat and needed to be addressed. Because it was only monkeys, nobody in the government took it seriously enough to increase funding, to advance listening posts, check-points for fruits coming in to this country. They spend more time quarantining an animal coming into the United States, and you can go to Dallas airport or Kennedy, and people just walk right through, right off the plane, as we’ve seen with SARS. They all said you can infect half this planet in about seventy-two hours by international air traffic.

“So what they wished had happened — and it’s a horrible thing to say — was that a person had died of Ebola brought over here by monkeys, so it would give them the strength and the ‘go juice’ to go get government funding to begin work on a vaccine, on anti-serums, on controls about people coming in to this country with infectious diseases. That was the hope of people co-operating with the project,” Hart explains. “All they wanted to do was scare the shit out of the public, so they’d have some more juice to go back to Congress and get more funding for virology research, for virology protocols, for infectious diseases — how they’re diagnosed — for immigration controls, checks at airports, all of which came into focus during the SARS outbreak. And every one of those virologists I worked with said, ‘We are not ready, we are not doing anything to get ready,’ and, ‘It’s not a case of if, it’s a case of when.’” It was for this reason, Hart says, the real-life protagonists gave him dramatic licence to fictionalise the third act, “to dramatically show what would have happened had this outbreak been virulent to humans, and how quickly it could spread and how unprepared we were.”

They also gave Hart licence to bring one of the world’s most famous virologists, Karl Johnson, into the script, because although he played no part in the Reston outbreak, and did not interact with the Jaaxes in real life, everyone agreed he should be part of the story. Says Hart, “I was able to fictionalise a professional relationship [between Nancy and Karl] based on their real credentials, [as if] Karl had been involved in the outbreak at Reston. Nancy had actually studied Karl’s work in real life, so all of the strings we pulled together had roots in reality, we just fictionalised them.” At one point, Hart flew to Montana and spent time with Johnson and his wife: “He sat me down and played me audio tapes that he still had from the 1976 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, where they stood in the middle of a village not believing what they were seeing, and trying to set down for voice record a tape to send back to London, so they would know how serious this outbreak was. So I got to go back and do Zaire [in the script] the way nobody had ever seen it, what really happened on the ground when they went into these missions and these villages, and the whole primitive approach to disease control, and how these native tribes dealt with it.”

Although elements of the story would be fictionalised for dramatic reasons, both Hart and Preston were adamant that the pathology and histology of the virus itself must remain absolutely true to life. “I was writing a work based on non-fiction that was going to be fiction,” Hart explains, “but every element of it had to be true. We couldn’t invent a cure. We couldn’t say, ‘Okay we’re gonna do this because this is how the virus behaves, or we’re gonna make this happen.’ Everything in those early drafts absolutely comes from the pathology of virus research and what the pathogens actually do and how they’re tracked and what they do to the human body.”

Hart’s numerous consultations and conversations with Preston yielded other nuggets of fact he was able to use in his script, including a so-called ‘magic bullet’ — a nun who had been infected with Ebola during the 1976 outbreak, but whose antibodies had somehow fought off the disease, and could perhaps be used to generate a serum. “The nun is real,” Hart says. “Karl Johnson told me about [her]. They actually still had her blood samples recorded at USAMRIID or CDC. Now ultimately she died, but she lasted a long time, and there were two or three other people who survived it, and all of their blood samples were sent back to this country in 1976. Tiny, the worker at the monkey house, was real, but nobody had ever told those stories, so we just amped up the story of Tiny — that if he was a carrier but also immune, he might hold the ‘magic bullet’, his might be the magic blood antibodies that could save people if they could throw off an antiserum. Karl even explained to me how to spin a blood sample in a helicopter with a coat hanger when they were in the field: because they didn’t have the lab equipment where you throw off the red and white blood cells, they would get a coat hanger and spin it as fast as they could to try to spin off the blood cells. So these guys knew what they were doing, and nobody understood how serious the outbreak was in the monkey house, and how widespread the Ebola virus could be — the only evidence we had of how virulent it was was 1976.”

Hart wrote intensively throughout the summer of 1993, finally delivering his first draft on 9 October that year. The script opens in the Ebola River region of Zaire in 1976, as Center for Disease Control virologist Karl Johnson visits ground zero during the first outbreak of the Ebola filovirus among humans. Ten pages later, the equivalent of ten minutes of screen time, the story leaps forward to 1989, as Nancy Jaax and her ex-Army husband, now a veterinary surgeon, learn of a disease which is wiping out imported monkeys at a biological research laboratory located next to a day care centre in Reston, Virginia — just twenty-five miles from Washington, DC. It is another thirty pages before Jaax contacts Johnson to ask for his help, from which point on the pair work together to contain the spread of the virus by culling the infected monkeys. Within days, however, one of the monkeys’ handlers, Tiny, shows symptoms of the disease, indicating that the virus can jump species and is airborne. In one particularly gripping sequence, Tiny, unaware that he is carrying the virus, walks into a crowded cinema — a scene which would certainly bring home to a cinema audience the risks involved with such a virulent contagion.

Hart says his script was greeted with great enthusiasm by all concerned. “The studio were real happy, the real-life people were happy, Lynda was happy, and I was thrilled because I’d redeemed myself for getting slaughtered on Contact. The studio wanted me to do one more draft,” he adds, “[and] there was a lot of anticipation about it from actors, directors — everyone was sort of in line to see what we were up to. I did a bunch of drafts, but the next ‘official’ one was in December of 1993, and that’s the draft that Jodie Foster signed on to.” With Nancy Jaax very much the heroine of the film, it was perhaps unsurprising that finding an A-list actress proved relatively simple. Nevertheless, signing two-time Academy Award-winner Foster was a major coup. “Jodie loved the character of Nancy Jaax,” says Hart, “and I was thrilled when she signed on. She was the first piece of talent to attach herself.”

Behind the camera, Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen — then riding high on the success of In the Line of Fire — topped the wish-lists of the producers of both The Hot Zone and Outbreak. “I got the scripts on my desk the same day,” Petersen told Entertainment Weekly. “I decided to do Outbreak. Sometimes you can tell a better story with fiction.” When Petersen passed on The Hot Zone, Fox began negotiating with director Ridley Scott, on whose behalf Paramount had unsuccessfully bid for the rights to the article, and whose own production company, Scott Free, was ready to bring half of the financing to the table. Says Hart, “It turned into a very complicated negotiation, and we were losing time against Outbreak, [because] they had a script they were somewhat happy with.” Preston clearly did not agree, describing Neal Jimenez’s Outbreak shooting script as “Curious George Gets the Andromeda Strain”.

Scott finally signed on to direct the film in February 1994, at which point Hart suddenly found himself off the project, another victim of Hollywood’s fondness for developing a great script into a mediocre one by throwing too many writers and too few ideas at it. Thus, he says, “After all this excitement about the script, I found out one day that Michael London, who was the executive on the project, had called other agencies looking for new writers. I was not happy,” Hart continues, “because the one thing I said to Lynda Obst after Contact was, ‘If I deliver for you, don’t replace me. Let me stay in the trenches with you — I’ll have done the research, these people will trust me.’ Richard Preston and I had been in constant contact, and every one of the real people was thrilled with how they had been portrayed in the script, with how the science worked, how the histology of the disease worked. To his credit, Tom Jacobson called and said, ‘Look, Jim, you’ve done the heavy lifting here, you’ve gotten us this far — this was a decision that was made in order to develop this further, because of this time crunch we’re up against,’ blah blah blah. And I said, ‘Okay, Tom, you make your own decision.’ I took my family, and went to Florida on vacation, and said, ‘You know where to find me.’”

In the meantime, Scott brought in screenwriter Tom Topor (The Accused) for what he describes as “an eleventh-hour, page-one rewrite” of the script, which Topor says Scott saw as “a science-fact thriller”. Although Topor describes Preston’s story as “brilliant”, he notes that it was basically about how everybody dodged a bullet, “and you can’t really make a movie about that. So Ridley’s picture was going to have to invent. It wasn’t exactly fantasy,” he adds, “because the research starts with the Ebola virus. But the script went way beyond the science.” Before Topor could begin work, however, Robert Redford had entered into negotiations for the role of Karl Johnson. The resulting disagreements over the direction the script should take sparked an internal power struggle between Robert Redford — who had signed on for $8 million and script approval — and Ridley Scott, with Topor caught in the middle. “I had a long talk with Ridley and Lynda Obst,” Topor recalls, “and the next thing I know, Lynda told me that Bob [Redford] wanted a writer he’d worked with before.” Redford’s choice was Richard Friedenberg, who had scripted Redford’s most recent film as director, A River Runs Through It.

“I can’t remember how I got on the project, although I’m sure Bob [Redford] had something to do with it. I read and worked from Jim Hart’s script,” Friedenberg recalls, adding that he was guided by ‘notes’ — Hollywood jargon for advice on how the script should be developed — from Obst, Scott, Scott’s producing partner Mimi Polk and others. “Everybody gives writers notes,” he points out, “[even] the garbage man. And the notes always conflict.” Friedenberg says that Redford was not involved in the day-to-day development, yet his prime directive was to expand the role of Karl Johnson into one more suitable for an actor of Redford’s stature. “I met the author, Richard Preston, a wonderful guy,” says Friedenberg. “We had a good time. Talked a lot. I did research in Maryland at the centre that was in the book. Met a lot of very interesting people, learned a lot. That’s the best thing about what I do.”

Although unable to recall specific problems which he was called upon to solve, or issues his rewrite was to address, Friedenberg says that he was trying to create something “real and tough, without the usual Hollywood crap. That was the big battle — no dying daughter, or dying girlfriend, etc. How do you dramatise the situation realistically? How could it actually spread? How could you stop it? And how could you make it appeal to the studio mentality without adding in a lot of stupid, improbable rubbish? I worked out a story [outline] that I thought was quite good,” he says. “Lynda agreed. We presented it in a meeting with a lot of people. Everyone liked it except Ridley’s partner,” he adds, referring to Mimi Polk. “She said, ‘It’s crap,’ as I recall, and suddenly everyone agreed. I remember Lynda excused herself at that point and went into the lobby of the office and lay down for a while. That was the beginning of the end.” After working on the project for several more weeks, Friedenberg says he hated it so much that he begged to be fired. “I spoke to the Fox executive after a particularly egregious notes meeting and gave him all the reasons he should fire me. He took pity and let me off the hook.”

Jim Hart was still in Florida when he received a call from Tom Jacobson, begging him to come back to work on The Hot Zone. “He called me and said, ‘We’re under pressure from the Warner Bros project, [and] I’ve got a week to land a new outline for Redford.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘It’s moving away from what we all like.’” Hart learned that Richard Friedenberg’s outline had expanded Karl Johnson’s character, since that was the one Redford was going to play, and moved it away from Nancy as the hero of the piece. “Richard and I spoke,” Hart remembers, “and he said, ‘Use any of my work you can find in there, if you can do it. Read it, use it, good luck — I’m so glad to be off this.’” Hart agreed to come back to work on the film as soon as his vacation was over, and was ultimately able to salvage several ideas from Friedenberg’s outline, including a major plot point about a worker in the monkey house who would emerge as a carrier, and drive the third act as Jaax and Johnson hunt him down.

At this point, more cracks were beginning to show in the relationship between Ridley Scott and Lynda Obst. Says Hart, “The politics started getting real strange, because you had Redford’s influence creeping in, Ridley’s entire gang of talent that came to the table, and you had Lynda, who really had been the driving force behind this, and is one of the most creative producers that we have in the business — she is a writer, she works well with writers, and she’s very tenacious and knows storytelling. But Ridley brought his whole company, and he was bringing half the financing to the table, so it was going to be a Ridley Scott movie, and suddenly Lynda Obst is moved outside the inner circle. And Ridley was not necessarily the friend of movie stars, and I don’t think there was any love lost between Ridley and Redford, and Ridley and Jodie.”

On top of which, Hart says, “the project had suddenly become more important than any element involved. It was now a cause: the race between this project and Outbreak.” It was a race that Fox wanted to win, he adds, “but at the Warner Bros studio, they had one of the longest running managements at any studio at that time, they knew what they were doing. They’d played this game before, and they knew how to win.” As Obst put it in Hello, He Lied, “Getting any picture mounted is a Sisyphean task, but this one was complicated by a closely observed struggle between studios and rival producers... The press and each side’s self-interest had turned [the production] into a frenzied competition between studios and rival producers that soon escalated into a pitched battle... It was the most unstable project I’d ever worked on.”

“I thought I had seen the extent of the joys and disappointments that Hollywood had to offer,” Obst added. “But none of it had prepared me for the highs and lows and lower lows of The Hot Zone... Every Friday, after I’d spent a full week keeping the package — the director, the script, and stars — together, it would fall apart again.” Every weekend, Obst had to hustle to put it back together. Every Monday the press would call to ask (for example), ‘Is it true that Ridley Scott is dropping out?’ ‘Of course not,’ she would reply, relieved not to be lying (at least for the moment). Then the package would threaten to fall apart again, Obst would put it back together, and another Monday would come... “This is the greatest crisis for a producer: the threat of watching your baby die. I had to keep it alive, hour by hour, day by day.” Ultimately, says Hart, “The Hot Zone began to founder because there were — and rightfully so — all of these very successful egos to-ing and fro-ing over this project. I remember being on the phone to Richard Preston and he would say, ‘What’s happening?’ And I’d say, ‘This is what’s gonna happen, this is why it’s gonna happen. Just watch — this is why it’s gonna unravel.’”

For Obst, keeping each party from fatally losing faith in the face of such adversity was all part of her role as producer: “Like Atlas, I felt like I was balancing all the issues of the movie on my shoulders: the director’s fear of the studio, the studio’s fear of the director, all of our fears of the potent movie stars — Robert Redford and Jodie Foster — who could make us or break us at any juncture. But all of these opposing forces could have been tamed with the proper amount of time. In the context of a race to production — everyone believed that there was a place for only one such movie in the marketplace, but no one was folding — time was a luxury we didn’t have. All of us — director, studio, stars, me — were deeply concerned about how the race would compromise the movie.” Meanwhile, the press was eating up the story, until the coverage of the race began affecting the basic process of putting the movie together, a situation she described as “a kind of media Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”

“I felt that Ridley was going to make a great film,” says Hart, “but I began to see how all the work you do in the beginning starts to get unravelled as other film-makers come on board and — rightfully so — bring their vision to it. It was fascinating to work with Ridley because my job became, ‘How do I take this idea Ridley has for a brilliant shot or a brilliant sequence and make it work in the movie?’” For instance, Scott had an idea about Tiny’s character getting on an aircraft, trying to get home to his mother, and being sick. “This actually comes from a scene out of Richard Preston’s book that really happened. Ridley wanted this guy coughing up his guts into a [air sickness] bag, and then when the military ground the plane and surround it and want him to come out, he goes into the men’s room and tries to flush the bag down the vacuum toilet, and it explodes and sends blood out under the door and up into the air conditioning system... This is all Ridley’s idea, and I’m going ‘Wow!’ So this was in the best draft, the last draft I wrote, this whole sequence where Karl Johnson and Nancy Jaax go into the plane to get Tiny out, and it is a scary sequence, when the blood bag explodes.

“That’s what Ridley brought to the table: his extraordinary visual facility, which is at his fingertips. It didn’t always fit into the narrative, and didn’t always take the narrative into consideration — there were several things in Topor’s shooting script that Ridley wanted to do that I still don’t get — but it was exciting. So I had been brought back to try to help here. They were under enormous pressure from Warner Bros, and I was also told that Jodie wasn’t happy with the shift away from her character and the move toward Redford’s character.”

It was at this point that Obst received a call from Redford’s agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), whom she described as “a close ally and friend”, informing her that the director and screenwriter of Outbreak were flying out to meet with Redford, ready to offer him the lead in their film. “You just start laughing at what you’re up against,” says Hart. “They’re just feeding off of each other — ‘take my arm and his leg and this guy’s heart...’” Somehow, Variety reporter Mike Fleming got a whiff of the rumour. “Now I’m really screwed,” thought Obst. “If it’s reported, it could unravel Jodie. Two actors gone, no movie... Bosnian Muslims were under genocidal siege, Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis, the prospect of national health care was falling to pieces while O.J. ran, and I wish I could tell you that I was aware of any of it. But this kind of pseudodrama shrinks perspective, rendering us (or at least me) myopic to the rest of the world. All news becomes the trades’ industry news, and you are it.”

In the event, Redford declined the rival offer. Says Hart, “To his credit he said, ‘No I’m gonna do The Hot Zone’ — one, because he’d committed to it first, and two, because it was a more true to life project, and if he was going to be involved, he wanted to be involved in the one that was trying to break new ground, as opposed to just an action-adventure movie.”

Next, Hart flew out for a meeting with Redford, whom he had known through the writers’ workshops at the Sundance Institute, where Hart had previously worked with fellow Hot Zone writer Richard Friedenberg. “I begged him to please play the character that I was writing,” says Hart. “I wrote a living legend in Karl Johnson — literally, a living legend. I gave Karl Johnson a role he never got to play in real life, and it was a great character: a romantic character who didn’t have to have a romance, [who] every female in the audience would gravitate to and every male in the audience would want to be like. It was like having a hero out of King Solomon’s Mines or Denys Finch Hatton,” he adds, referring to a real-life figure Redford’s character in Out of Africa had been based on. “A guy that was of the world, who brought enormous experience to the table and who was a renegade and a rogue and an outsider and who struck fear into bureaucracy!” Hart is not sure if Redford was confusing the size of the role with its stature, but “all I know is, I lost.”

Redford brought in another of his favourite writers, Paul Attanasio, who would earn an Oscar nomination for his script for Redford’s next film as director, Quiz Show. “Attanasio is a fantastic writer,” says Hart, “but nobody had done the research, and nobody had been in the soup with these people, except me and Richard Preston. And the speed, the pressure, the race all began to take its toll on where the project had been a year earlier. Jodie Foster was plenty a movie star, Redford would have been brilliant in the [Karl Johnson] role, but I think that the romance that crept into the Attanasio script, that did it for Jodie. I think there was actually a kiss between Karl Johnson and Nancy Jaax in the ‘hot zone’ lab, and this movie was not about a romance — it was about heroic people in an extraordinary situation; people that you see driving a station wagon full of kids to school who are also saving the world. It wasn’t about a romance between people that were working in close quarters with each other. But, I will say this, The Hot Zone was a perfect situation for a male-female romance to emerge if that was where you were going with the movie. This movie did not have to hang on a romance or the attraction of two people to each other to make it interesting, yet it was the perfect set-up for that kind of relationship to evolve.”

Hart was among the first to hear that Foster had quit the project. “Someone had seen Jodie at a party in New York and she said that she was pulling out because the character I had written was no longer the character in the script. The focus had changed, and she was going. I remember calling Lynda Obst from New York — I woke her up — and I felt terrible because I thought Lynda knew. She was very upset and very angry.” Nevertheless, Foster “jumped species” onto another Obst production, Contact, which she had read more than a year earlier (when she was sent it as a sample of Hart’s writing), and in which, after several more years in Development Hell, she would play the lead role.

Even with Foster gone, Hart agreed to come back in for the third and last time. “I took Richard’s outline and folded his great ideas about ‘patient zero’ — the carrier — into the draft,” he says. “I met with Jerry and Nancy Jaax and explained to them that if I was going to make this work dramatically, I would have to take licence with their relationship, and that I was gonna make one of them sick, and I was gonna invade their family — and in the script it’s their daughter who gets sick. [The Jaaxes’ colleague] Peter Jarling told me their wives would always say ‘Don’t bring your work home from the office,’ because the worst thing that could happen is that you walk out of the lab and take something home in your system that’s gonna infect your family. And when they told me that, I just went, ‘Okay, the daughter’s gonna get infected.’”

Hart also attempted to address some of the romantic elements which Attanasio had brought into the script, apparently at Redford’s request, but which Hart felt threatened the reality of the relationship between Nancy and Jerry. His solution was simple: “I put Jerry in Desert Storm, in an outbreak where they were hunting for biological weapons, believe it or not. And he was gonna be brought home for Thanksgiving, but he was leading a biohazard team to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! So he is reintroduced into the story at a time when Nancy and Karl have been spending a lot of time together, so there is a natural tension in his return. But there is never any doubt that Nancy is madly in love with her husband, and has a successful relationship and a successful family.

“The May ’94 draft brought together Richard Friedenberg’s work, Paul Attanasio’s work, the work Ridley had brought to the table, [and] Redford’s desires — yet still maintained the integrity of Nancy and Jerry Jaax. The end of that draft is still talked about,” Hart adds. “Karl Johnson is saying goodbye to Nancy after the monkey house is over and they’ve successfully spun off the serum and begun to deal with the outbreak, and Karl gets on the plane and you see from the point of view of the virus up in the air system, moving to the little nozzles, and suddenly it stops over Karl Johnson, and just as it rushes down towards him, he reaches up and turns off the nozzle, and the screen goes black. It is the way the movie should end, and I still get calls about it from people who read the script. That unproduced screenplay has gotten me more work than Hook and Dracula put together. It was my swansong,” he says. “I turned that draft in — it’s 154 pages long — and I said, ‘Here — I’m going.’”

“After Jodie went, we went to Meryl Streep,” said Obst, relishing the opportunity to re-team the multiple Oscar-winner with Redford, her co-star in Out of Africa. “Her agents thought we had a great shot.” With The Hot Zone now a mere eighteen days from the date principal photography was due to begin, Tom Topor received a call from one of Scott’s associates, asking him if he was available for “an instantaneous production rewrite” which they could use to entice Streep aboard. “They sent me all of the scripts,” Topor recalls, “and then Ridley and I got on the phone, and I said, ‘Look, you email me a list of all of the big set-pieces that you absolutely want to keep, because I’m going to treat this as though I’m doing a musical on Broadway — you tell me the songs you want to keep, and I’ll write around your songs.’ I said, ‘I will give you all your set-pieces, but you’ve got to give me a lot of manoeuvring room for the rest of it.’”

Scott agreed, but requested that Topor talk with Redford, and with Streep, who was considering whether to replace Foster on The Hot Zone or join Clint Eastwood for The Bridges of Madison County. Says Topor, “I got on the telephone with Bob, and we had sort of a ‘meet and greet’ conversation, and then I talked to Meryl, and she gave me a lot of ideas about her character. But then she said, ‘When do you think it’ll be done?’” Topor was forced to admit that, despite the approaching start date, he was still taking notes from Scott and Redford, and had yet to begin work on his screenplay. “I could tell that the moment she heard I had nothing on paper, she was going to take the offer from Eastwood. The River Wild [an action-packed thriller toplining Streep] was about to be released, and everybody thought that was going to be a huge hit. So she bowed out.”

The next time Topor spoke with Redford, he suggested that Redford and Scott needed to have further discussions about the direction the script was taking: “I said, ‘The way Ridley sees this is essentially a duet, and the way you’re talking, it doesn’t sound like that. So I will do anything you want, but I have to have a consensus between you and the director.’ And not long after that, Bob disappeared, too.” Redford officially quit on 12 August. “It was like a train wreck in extended slow motion,” Preston told Time’s Richard Corliss. “It begins with a smell of smoke; then one wheel hops the track; then a freight car goes off; then it turns sideways and the whole train begins to telescope. That’s when it goes off the rails and into the canyon. By Hollywood standards, this project took a long time to come apart,” he added. “Usually they explode immediately.”

While The Hot Zone was haemorrhaging stars, Outbreak’s cast list was beginning to read like a ‘who’s who’ of Hollywood: two-time Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman and In the Line of Fire’s Rene Russo would headline as virologist Colonel Sam Daniels and his colleague and ex-wife Robby Keough; Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding Jr would play USAMRIID personnel; and Morgan Freeman would play a Brigadier-General. Then, when Joe Don Baker (Edge of Darkness) was dismissed several weeks into production, a bigger star, Donald Sutherland, took his place. Yet Outbreak was having script problems of its own: after Dworet and Pool’s initial drafts, a succession of screenwriters, including Jeb Stuart (The Fugitive) and Carrie Fisher (Postcards From the Edge), worked on the script, the latter at a reported cost of $100,000 per week. Petersen later brought in The Waterdance screenwriter Neal Jimenez to “improve the pacing and structure”, while Hoffman, unhappy with his lines in one scene, brought in prize-winning poet and novelist Maya Angelou to sharpen the dialogue. The script was still far from finished when, on 13 July 1994, Kopelson sent Petersen and his crew to shoot exteriors in Eureka, California, effectively announcing the commencement of principal photography, and throwing The Hot Zone into further crisis. “They shot second-unit monkey footage for weeks on end,” said Obst, “as they were raced into production without a script, too.”

The other difficulty for The Hot Zone, Topor explains, was trying to cast the film barely two weeks before production was due to begin. “There were very few [actors] available at such short notice,” he says, “and by this time there had been so much bad publicity in the papers, that even for people who might have wanted to work for him [Scott], it looked like they were coming into a troubled movie that was similar to a movie that was already in production.”

“When the Fox project exploded, they didn’t want to talk about it,” said Preston. “They were resolutely insisting that all was hunky-dory, and ten minutes later someone would be weeping [to me] about how the Fox project was like a shipwreck.” The fact that Scott was unable to set it up elsewhere — even at Paramount, which had originally bid for the story on Scott’s behalf — did not surprise Tom Topor. “I can understand why other studios didn’t pick it up,” he says. “It was a very expensive picture — $40 or $50 million — and Outbreak was already in the works. As [Paramount president] Sherry Lansing said to Ridley, ‘I like what you’ve got better, but it’s not that much different.’”

“There was a sense of outrage that the producers of [Outbreak] had violated a kind of unspoken code: that if you spend a lot of dough and get the rights to a project — in this case an article — then you have in effect protected yourself from being ripped off. It’s yours to do and no one else’s,” says Friedenberg. “The Outbreak people lost the battle for the rights to ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’, and instead of going away as everyone else does, they just went ahead, claiming their right to use material in the public domain, like newspaper reports, etc. There was talk of suing and so forth, but they just ploughed ahead and won.” Adds Hart, “I was so angry because I thought Fox had a copyright infringement suit against Warners. They claim they didn’t, but Richard [Preston] and I both know that there were things in that screenplay that did not exist in any article, that had not been previously published, but that came out of the research [for The Hot Zone script], and the producers [of Outbreak] freely admitted they read every draft we turned in. The scene of the aerosol in the monkey house going up in the vents and coming down in the next room, the scene in the movie theatre, [and] people coughing and having it backlit in the air from a movie projector — stuff that’s in my script that didn’t exist in any book. But Fox business affairs did not feel they had a successful case against Warners. Warners out-managed and out-produced Fox. It was a big learning curve for everybody.” Worst of all, says Friedenberg, was that “it looked like a ‘go’ movie. We had Redford, Ridley Scott and a script in progress. That’s a lot to have. But instead of making it better, that just made everyone push to do a Hollywood number instead of an intelligent, thoughtful and honest film. I’d just worked with Bob on A River Runs Through It, a totally uncompromised project, and I naïvely thought that this could be the same. What an idiot.”

Finally, in August 1994, Fox pulled the plug on The Hot Zone. Warner Bros took the opportunity to shut down Outbreak, which was having problems of its own. According to Robert Roy Pool, the script for Outbreak had become a battleground, with both he and Laurence Dworet engaging in “extreme creative conflicts” with one of the Warner Bros executives, apparently over the writers’ desire to keep the story as realistic as possible. After working on the script for a year, they left by mutual agreement. Nevertheless, Pool maintained his link with the production, making frequent visits to the set, and remaining friendly with Petersen, producers Kopelson and Gail Katz, and the incoming screenwriter Neal Jimenez, “an old poker buddy” of Pool’s. Pool also claimed to have read “every draft by every writer”, and was therefore in a position to state that although as many as fifteen screenwriters had contributed dialogue to the final script, “ninety-five per cent of the dialogue changes were simple enhancements of ideas we had already introduced in our final screenplay of December 1993.”

According to Pool, the story, characters, structure and scenes in Outbreak were his and Dworet’s creations: “Ted Tally contributed exactly one scene in the movie, and it’s a very good one — Dustin Hoffman looks up at an air vent, the camera dollies through the vent, and Hoffman says, ‘It’s airborne.’” Pool noted that after Tally departed, Jeb Stuart was hired, but soon left through the door marked ‘creative differences’. Once Fox’s competing project fell apart, the Outbreak crew took a week’s hiatus, and Neal Jimenez was hired to rework the dialogue to Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction. Nevertheless, Pool suggested, “the phrase ‘Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction’ is an oxymoron. Neal began to realize that Dustin would never be happy — not in this lifetime, anyway — and once the picture started rolling again, Neal showed up on the set less and less often. He felt insulted and ignored when the actors refused to speak the lines he’d written and substituted their own phrases.” On the final day of shooting, Jimenez told his old poker buddy that he might not have signed on for the job if he’d known what lay ahead.

Outbreak opened in the US on 10 March 1995, grossing $13.4 million in its opening weekend, and a total of $187 million worldwide. “On opening day, [Fox chairman] Peter Chernin and I were talking on the cellphone,” Hart recalls, “and he said to me, ‘We shut down for the wrong movie!’, meaning we never should have folded our tent. They could have opened both of those movies on the same day and The Hot Zone would have been the one that people went back to see a second time.” Preston was among those who paid to see Outbreak. “I’m just sitting here laughing,” he told Entertainment Weekly afterwards. “It just wasn’t scary. You have scabs that look like Gummi Bears. The blood was put on with an eyedropper. In a real [Ebola attack], the men bleed out of their nipples. I would have liked to see Hoffman bleed out of his nipples.” Robert Roy Pool, one of only two credited screenwriters on the finished film (Dworet was the other), had had enough. In a letter to Entertainment Weekly published in full on 21 April 1995, he strove finally to set the record straight about the origins of the movie, stating that he and Dworet had not “ripped off” Preston’s story — but that the author had gained a great deal of publicity from claiming otherwise. On the contrary, Pool went on, he and Dworet had written the entire screenplay for Outbreak, notwithstanding embellishments by three subsequent writers, the cast and Wolfgang Petersen.

According to Pool, Warner Bros had been trying to persuade him and Dworet — a qualified medical doctor — to write an action-suspense film for them for more than two years, but had not found the right project until November 1992, when a senior executive asked them if they would be interested in writing a screenplay based on ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. At the time, they declined, believing that the story had several fundamental problems. “First, nothing very dramatic happens — it just threatens to happen,” Pool explained. “Second, the climactic action of the story is the euthanization of hundreds of monkeys — an extraordinarily grim finale for a major studio feature.” The writers believed that a movie was unlikely to emerge from Preston’s story — and even if it did, would struggle to find an audience.

Instead, Pool and Dworet drew the studio’s attention to an idea they had been working on for more than a decade, following Dworet’s research into another haemorrhagic illness, Lassa Fever, at medical school in 1975, which seemed to presage the end of the world. The pair worked up a story idea in February 1982 which Pool described as follows: “an emergency room doctor leads a battle against a bizarre African virus spreading in a small Idaho town. This battle eventually assumes a military dimension when the National Guard has to be called in to enforce the quarantine and protect the world from a devastating plague.” Pool and Dworet were fascinated by the social and moral implications of the story. What would really happen if such a virus broke out? Tough decisions would almost certainly follow. Would they isolate — or even annihilate — an entire town in order to prevent the spread of a contagious and incurable disease? A decade later, in 1992, Pool and Dworet sold the pitch to Warner Bros, at which point Arnold Kopelson suggested optioning Preston’s magazine story. “We told him that we had no intention of using Preston’s story,” Pool said, “and that Preston didn’t own the underlying subject matter — no one could.” Although Kopelson’s lawyers agreed, the producer decided to bid for the story regardless, feeling that Preston’s research might prove useful to the project. When he was outbid, he went back to working on the Pool-Dworet story while Fox fast-tracked its adaptation of ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. And so the race was on.

In spite of the chaos surrounding the picture, however, Pool felt that Wolfgang Petersen had ultimately managed to make one of the most exciting movies he had ever seen, and that while Outbreak stretches credibility, “it’s never boring.” As for Richard Preston, “[he] is very talented... but he has amazing arrogance to think that, by writing one story for The New Yorker, he somehow owns an entire scientific subject.” On the contrary, Pool said, many other writers have addressed the subject of deadly plagues, from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722 to John Fuller’s Fever!, published 250 years later, detailing Nigeria’s Lassa Fever mini-epidemic of 1969. “Laurence and I read scores of articles about haemorrhagic fevers in medical journals and found hundreds more we didn’t have time to retrieve. We won the competition fair and square,” he concluded. “Richard Preston should stop whining and start writing his next book.”

Yet, like the virus it described, it appears that The Hot Zone cannot easily be subdued, and may yet return in mutated form. “Because I lost the race on Hot Zone doesn’t mean it won’t be made,” Obst wrote in 1996, by which time Preston’s book had been on the bestseller list for almost two years. “Maybe I just lost the race to mediocrity; so every time I meet a new director who could be right or read a new writer who could save the script, Hot Zone moves to the front burner, ready to start cooking.” Sure enough, on 2 July 2002, Variety reported that Fox was reviving the film, with Scott McGehee and David Siegel (Suture, The Deep End) set to direct a new draft by Emmy-winning writer Erik Jendreson (Band of Brothers, The 300 Spartans). “It’s a great script,” said McGehee, “very similar to the original story.” Hart remembers being contacted by Lynda Obst when Jendreson was first brought in, around the same time that a small outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred as thousands of refugees were streaming across the border to escape the genocide in Somalia. “Lynda called me — I think it was after Contact, so it must have been 1998 or 1999 — and said they were bringing in [Jendreson,] who had just won an Emmy for E.R.. She wanted to know if I would be willing to work as an executive producer on the project, and work with this writer in a supervisory capacity. I was flattered,” he says, “but I also was not stupid — I had been through this a number of times before.

“We spitballed what the take would be, how we evolved what we did in The Hot Zone to now, and it was gonna be a global outbreak like SARS, as opposed to just being contained in Reston,” Hart continues. “That was almost going to be a main title sequence, and we were gonna do a global outbreak using the airline scenario. The problem was that if I was gonna get involved as an executive producer, it was going to have to be very clear what the credit situation was going to be.” After suffering through a tumultuous credit arbitration process — “a horrible situation which pitches writers against each other” — on Contact, he had worked on two films where the writers had agreed among themselves what the credits should be: an all too rare process, which the Writers Guild of America encourages in its governing agreements.

“I said to Lynda, ‘I can’t do this unless we agree up front on how credits are gonna be shared. I’m happy to take second position or third position, but I should be in there for screen story credit because I had pioneered the first draft,’” Hart recalls, “and she was not willing to let me have that conversation with Eric.” She did, however, subsequently let Hart know that the draft had not worked, and that the project had been abandoned once again. “I later ran across this script,” Hart says, “and again it just misses the characters of Nancy and Jerry Jaax and Karl Johnson and all the people that I was lucky enough to meet. I don’t care how many writers they put on it, if they could get something they were happy with and just do it, if it was closer to Richard Preston’s book, or even what I did with Richard Preston at the beginning with Lynda Obst... Karl Johnson has now written his own non-fiction novel about his experiences with outbreaks, and asked me if I’d be interested in adapting the screenplay — and I can’t wait to read it. He is a guy who has been at the epicentre longer than anybody else in virology, and I hope his story, which he’s going to try and get published, is as exciting and terrifying as anything that happened in The Hot Zone.”

Richard Preston, who has since published further bestsellers, the movie rights to which were sold for millions of dollars, has described his first encounter with Hollywood as akin to “watching people break and enter cars in broad daylight — it just happens and everyone shrugs,” yet insists he hasn’t come out empty-handed. “I’ve had so much fun telling the ‘Call-me-Arnold’ story,” he said, of his memorable first phone call with Kopelson, “it’s almost worth it.” He also hopes that The Hot Zone may yet be revived by Hollywood: “I don’t know that the story is completely dead. In Hollywood, it always depends on if you believe in reincarnation.”

Indeed, despite the problems which have plagued the film for almost two decades, The Hot Zone remains in ‘active development’ at 20th Century Fox. “I think they want to go back to Richard Preston’s book and try to make it work,” says Hart. “The most recent rumour was that they were going back to my script, but I hear that’s been put on the back burner.” Richard Friedenberg is among the casualties of The Hot Zone who remains optimistic that the film will eventually be made, declaring, “It’s a worthy project and a terrific book.” Nevertheless, Friedenberg does not expect to see his name on the credits of any eventual adaptation. “My paltry input has been swept away long ago, and will not be reflected in any way in some future film,” he says. Nor is the crisis that was The Hot Zone an experience on which he wishes to reflect: “It was a very bad time for me. For some reason it was more disillusioning than most of my experiences, and I took it hard.” Ridley Scott also found the film’s eleventh hour collapse frustrating. “I would have loved to work with Jodie [Foster],” the director told biographer Paul M. Sammon, shortly before the actress bowed out of another Scott-directed project, Hannibal. “I also thought [The Hot Zone] was one of those rare projects, like Thelma & Louise, that was actually about something.”

Since the collapse of The Hot Zone, Hart has managed to use elements of his research in at least two scripts: Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life, which has a brief reference to the Ebola virus and is largely concerned with the potentially lethal effects of a deadly disease contained within Pandora’s Box (echoes of Outbreak’s original title, Pandora), and a draft of the as-yet-unproduced science fiction film The Outer Limits (detailed in later editions of my earlier book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made), in which a plague spreads across the globe in days, a precursor to an invasion by aliens. The Hot Zone, however, was not science fiction. “It was a new kind of thriller,” says Hart. “It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a brilliant film about paranoia which Philip Kaufman did, based on the original directed by Don Siegel — but this wasn’t science fiction, it was real.”

With diseases back in the media thanks to outbreaks of everything from SARS to swine flu (H1N1) and avian flu — and, perhaps more importantly in Hollywood terms, films such as Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded pandemic thriller Contagion proving popular with audiences — The Hot Zone may yet survive, mutate and flourish. After all, as Preston has pointed out, “It’s not like Alien, where people could shrug it off as science fiction. Now they’d be seeing someone come apart before their eyes and realising that the virus could be sitting next to them in the theatre. It could be anywhere.”

FALL AND RISE OF THE DARK KNIGHT

The long and winding road to Batman Begins

“I told them I’d cast Clint Eastwood as the Dark Knight, and shoot it in Tokyo, doubling for Gotham City. That got their attention.”

— proposed Batman 5 director Darren Aronofsky

Few heroes have inspired so many stories as the costumed crime fighter known to almost every man, woman and child on Earth as Batman. The creation of cartoonist Bob Kane and his (mostly uncredited) partner Bill Finger, Batman made his first appearance in Detective Comics #27, published in May 1939 — a year after Superman’s début. Lacking the superpowers of his predecessor, ‘The Bat-Man’ was forced to rely on his physical prowess, and the enormous wealth of his alter ego, the millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, who provided his costumed counterpart with a house (the Batcave), a car (the Batmobile), an aircraft (the Batplane) and a utility belt full of gadgets. Kane credited numerous influences for his creation, including Zorro, The Shadow and a 1930 film entitled The Bat Whispers, which featured a caped criminal who shines his bat insignia on the wall just prior to killing his victims. “I remember when I was twelve or thirteen... I came across a book about Leonardo da Vinci,” Kane added. “This had a picture of a flying machine with huge bat wings... It looked like a bat man to me.”

Batman first reached the silver screen as early as the 1940s, with the first of two fifteen-chapter Columbia serials: Batman (1943), starring Lewis Wilson as the Caped Crusader, and Batman and Robin (1949), with Robert Lowery. Almost two decades later, on 12 January 1966, the ABC television series starring Adam West and Burt Ward brought the characters to an entirely new generation, running for only two seasons, but earning a quickie big-screen spin-off within the first year. Although Kane’s earliest stories had a noir-ish sensibility, over time the characters developed the more playful personae that were magnificently captured by the camp capers of the TV series. “Batman and Robin were always punning and wisecracking and so were the villains,” Kane said in 1965. “It was camp way ahead of its time.” In the 1970s, Batman continued to appear in an animated series, Superfriends, but the legacy of the 1960s TV series meant that it was not until Frank Miller reinvented the character for the darkly gothic comic strip series The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One in the mid-1980s that the world was ready to take Batman seriously again.

Just as Batman had made his first appearance in comic strips a year after Superman, the development of the Batman movie — the first since the 1966 caper with Adam West — began a year after the blockbuster success of Superman: The Movie in 1978. Former Batman comic book writer Michael E. Uslan, together with his producing partner Benjamin Melniker, secured the film rights from DC Comics, announcing a 1981 release for the film, then budgeted at $15 million. Uslan and Melniker hired Superman’s (uncredited) screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz to script the story, which was set in the near future, and closely followed the Superman model: an extended origin story, followed by the genesis of his superhero alter ego, and his eventual confrontation with The Joker. It ended with the introduction of Robin. It was Uslan’s wish to make “a definitive Batman movie totally removed from the TV show, totally removed from camp; a version that went back to the original Bob Kane/Bill Finger strips.”

By 1983, the project was still languishing in Development Hell, as potential directors including Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) and Joe Dante (Gremlins) came and went. It was following the surprise success of Tim Burton’s slapstick comedy Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure that Warner Bros — whose stewardship of the project resulted from a deal with Peter Guber’s Casablanca Film Works, with whom Melniker had a development deal — offered the project to lifelong Bat-fan Tim Burton, who was busy making Beetlejuice for the studio. “The first treatment of Batman, the Mankiewicz script, was basically Superman, only the names had been changed,” Burton told Mark Salisbury. “It had the same jokey tone, as the story followed Bruce Wayne from childhood through to his beginnings as a crime fighter. They didn’t acknowledge any of the freakish nature of it... The Mankiewicz script made it more obvious to me that you couldn’t treat Batman like Superman, or treat it like the TV series, because it’s a guy dressing up as a bat and no matter what anyone says, that’s weird.” Although Burton had fond memories of the series, which he would run home from school to watch, he had no wish to duplicate its campy tone. Yet it would take the comic book boom of the late 1980s — notably the success of the collected edition of The Dark Knight Returns — to convince Warner Bros that Burton’s approach might connect with audiences. “The success of the graphic novel made our ideas far more acceptable,” he observed.

With Warner Bros’ blessing, Burton began working on a new draft with emerging screenwriting talent and fellow Bat-fan Sam Hamm, whose comedy script Pulitzer Prize had sparked a bidding war and landed him a two-year contract with Warner Bros. Hamm felt that the Superman model was wrong; that rather than dwell on Batman’s origins, the character should be presented as a fait accompli, with his background and motivations emerging as the story progressed, so that the unlocking of the mystery becomes part of the plot. “I tried to take the premise which had this emotionally scarred millionaire whose way of dealing with his traumas was by putting on the suit,” Hamm said. “If you look at it from this aspect, that there is no world of superheroes, no DC Universe and no real genre conventions to fall back on, you can start taking the character seriously. You can ask, ‘What if this guy actually does exist?’ And in turn, it’ll generate a lot of plot for you.” Burton liked the approach: “I’d just meet Sam on weekends to discuss the early writing stages. We knocked it into good shape while I directed Beetlejuice, but as a ‘go’ project it was only green-lighted by Warners when the opening figures for Beetlejuice surprised everybody — including myself!”

Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, Charlie Sheen and Pierce Brosnan were all rumoured to be on Warner Bros’ shortlist for the title role, although Jack Nicholson’s casting as The Joker meant that the studio could afford to go with an unknown — after all, it had worked with Christopher Reeve for Superman. Burton had his doubts. “In my mind I kept reading reviews that said, ‘Jack’s terrific, but the unknown as Batman is nothing special,’” he told Mark Salisbury. Neither did he want to cast an obvious action hero — “Why would this big, macho, Arnold Schwarzenegger-type person dress up as a bat for God’s sake?” Finally, it came down to only one choice: Michael Keaton, whom he had just directed in Beetlejuice. “That guy you could see putting on a bat-suit; he does it because he needs to, because he’s not this gigantic, strapping macho man. It’s all about transformation...” observed Burton. “Taking Michael and making him Batman just underscored the whole split personality thing which is really what I think the movie’s all about.”

By this time, Hamm’s involvement had been sidelined by the writers’ strike, so Burton brought in Beetlejuice writer Warren Skaaren and Charles McKeown (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Their principal job was to lighten the tone — not because of Keaton’s casting, but because of studio fears that a troubled and disturbed Batman, full of self-doubt and unresolved psychological issues, might turn off audiences. “I see what they’re doing,” Hamm conceded, “in that they don’t want to have a larger-than-life, heroic character who is plagued by doubts about the validity of what he’s doing, but it’s stuff that I miss.”

Principal photography began under tight security in October 1988. Although Sean Young’s riding accident threw the schedule out at an early stage, it could have spelled disaster for the production had it occurred later in the shoot; as it was, none of her scenes had to be re-shot when Kim Basinger stepped into Vicki Vale’s shoes. In spite of this early setback, the sheer scale of the production, the complexity of the special effects, the extensive night shoots, the large number of interior and exterior locations, and the restrictive nature of Jack Nicholson’s contract — which, despite his enormous fee, meant that he could only be called for a specified number of hours per day, including time spent in the makeup chair — Burton delivered the film on schedule, and only a fraction over budget. The anticipation for Batman was running at fever pitch by the time the film finally hit US cinemas on 21 June 1989, swooping to a record-breaking $42.7 million opening weekend, becoming the first film to hit $100 million after just ten days on release, and grossing $413 million worldwide. ‘Bat-mania’ swept the planet, with the film becoming not only the biggest film of 1989, but perhaps more significantly the most successful in Warner Bros’ history. Thus, it came as no surprise when the studio invited Burton back up to bat for the sequel. No one was more surprised than the director, however, when he said yes.

Although Warner Bros left the Gotham City set standing at Pinewood Studios (at a cost of $20,000 per day) in the hopes that the success of Batman would warrant a sequel, Batman Returns was ultimately shot in Los Angeles, with Burton again at the helm, and Michael Keaton back in the Batsuit. This time, Burton’s dark sensibilities were given a freer reign, with The Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) as the villains. Sam Hamm’s script (which also featured Catwoman) was rejected in favour of one by Heathers scribe Daniel Waters, which was subsequently doctored by Wesley Strick (Cape Fear).

“When I was hired to write Batman Returns ([called] Batman II at the time), I was asked to focus on one (big) problem with the current script: Penguin’s lack of a ‘master plan’,” Strick recalls. “To be honest, this didn’t especially bother me; in fact I found it refreshing — in comic book stories, there’s nothing hoarier or (usually) hokier than an arch-villain’s ‘master plan’. But the lack of one in Batman II was obsessing the Warner brass.” Strick says that he was presented with “the usual boring ideas to do with warming the city, or freezing the city, that kind of stuff.” (Warner executives evidently continued to have similar ideas as the years passed: a frozen Gotham ended up as a key plot device in Batman & Robin.)

Strick pitched an alternative approach — inspired by the ‘Moses’ parallels of Water’s prologue, in which Baby Penguin is bundled in a basket and thrown in the river where he floats, helpless, till he’s saved (and subsequently raised) by Gotham’s sewer denizens — in which Penguin’s ‘master plan’ is to kill the firstborn sons of Gotham City. Warner Bros loved it, and so did Burton. However, as Strick admits, “It turned out to be a controversial addition. The toy manufacturers were not alone in disliking it — it also did substantially less business than the first [Batman].” Indeed, although Batman Returns scored a bigger opening weekend ($45.6 million) than its predecessor, its worldwide gross was $282.8 million, barely two thirds of Batman’s score.

Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) — featuring Val Kilmer as Batman, Jim Carrey as The Riddler, Nicole Kidman as love interest Dr Chase Meridian, Chris O’Donnell as Robin, and (despite the casting of Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent in Batman) Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey Dent/ Two-Face — bounced back, with a $52.7 million opening weekend and a worldwide gross of $333 million. Yet the $42.87 million opening weekend and mere $237 million worldwide gross of the same director’s Batman & Robin (1997) — with George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell as the titular dynamic duo, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze, Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl — effectively put the franchise on hiatus, despite a reported $125 million in additional revenue from tie-in toys, merchandise, clothing and ancillary items.

Despite the fact that, as far as Warner Bros was concerned, the future of the franchise remained in doubt, a plethora of rumours, lies and/or wishful thinking circulated about a fifth Batman film. Madonna had been cast as The Joker’s twisted love interest, Harley Quinn. The adversary in Batman 5 was to be The Sacrecrow — a second rank villain first introduced in the comics in 1940 — played by John Travolta, Howard Stern or Jeff Goldblum (depending on which source you believed). Jack Nicholson was returning as The Joker, possibly in flashback or as hallucinations invoked by The Scarecrow. “The Joker is coming, and it’s no laughing matter,” Nicholson himself reportedly teased journalists when asked about upcoming projects at a press conference for As Good As It Gets. In fact such was the level of scuttlebutt in the months following the release of Batman & Robin that several of the most prominent Internet rumour-mills — including Dark Horizons and Coming Attractions — took the unusual step of placing a moratorium on Batman 5 rumours. Yet from all this sound and fury a few tales of the Bat did emerge which appeared to have an element of truth. One was that Mark Protosevich — who scripted The Cell and Ridley Scott’s unproduced adaptation of I Am Legend for Warner Bros — had written a script, entitled either Batman Triumphant or DarkKnight, which featured Arkham Asylum, The Scarecrow and Harley Quinn, as well as numerous nightmarish hallucinations of Batman’s past.

One of the biggest rumours centred on the casting of Batman himself. Despite the fact that George Clooney was contracted to make at least one more film in the series, Kurt Russell — then starring for Warner Bros in Paul Anderson’s ill-fated Soldier — was widely reported to be in line for the role, although producer Jon Peters was dismissive. “He’s not Batman,” he told Cinescape. “Forget it. How could he be Batman? He’s my age. He could be Batman’s father, but not Batman.” The studio, apparently hoping to break the ‘revolving door’ casting of the Batman role, publicly stood by Clooney, who appeared willing to fulfil his contract. “If there is another, I’d do it,” he told E! News in September 1997. “I have a contract to do it. It’d be interesting to get another crack at it to make it different or better. I’ll take a look at [Batman & Robin] again in a couple of months,” he added. “I got the sense that it fell short, so I need to go back and look at it, see what I could have done better.”

Although Clooney believed he had “killed the franchise”, it was director Joel Schumacher, who had wrenched the series almost all the way back to the campy style of the sixties TV show, who bore the brunt of the blame for the relatively poor performance of Batman & Robin. “I felt I had disappointed a lot of older fans by being too conscious of the family aspect,” he told Variety in early 1998. “I’d gotten tens of thousands of letters from parents asking for a film their children could go to. Now, I owe the hardcore fans the Batman movie they would love me to give them.” The implication was that he would be asked to make another Batman, and on 1 July 1998 he went further, telling E! Online that he had talked with Warner Bros production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura about the possibility of doing another one. “I would only do it on a much smaller scale, with less villains and truer in nature to the comic books,” he said.

Schumacher’s chief inspiration was Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, illustrated by Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again collaborator David Mazzucchelli, using a heavily-inked, high-contrast style which recalled newspaper strips like Dick Tracy, and coloured with earthy tones by Richmond Lewis. In just four twenty-four-page issues, Miller rewrote the first year of Batman mythology from the point of view of James Gordon, a young police lieutenant still years away from his promotion to the more familiar rank of Commissioner. As Miller wrote in his introduction to the collected edition, “If your only memory of Batman is that of Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars Vincent Price and Cesar Romero, I hope this book will come as a surprise.”

Year One begins as Gordon arrives in Gotham with his pregnant wife Ann, just as Bruce Wayne returns to the city where his parents were shot dead before his eyes eighteen years earlier. After twelve years of self-imposed exile, Wayne begins training himself for the double life he is soon to lead: layabout playboy by day, masked vigilante by night. However, while Bruce is discovering the difficulties inherent in trying to clean up streets that want to stay dirty, Lieutenant Gordon is finding that the corruption he encounters among street cops is endemic, and goes all the way to the top. Although Gordon initially endangers himself by exercising zero tolerance towards his corrupt colleagues, he also earns a reputation for heroics, making him as untouchable as he is incorruptible — until he slips into an affair with a beautiful colleague, Detective Essen, forcing him to admit his infidelity rather than give in to blackmail.

Meanwhile, just as a freak encounter with a bat has inspired Bruce Wayne to adopt an alter ego to strike fear into the dark hearts of the Gotham underworld — not to mention the same corrupt cops Gordon is fighting from the inside — so the ‘Batman’ inspires a cat-loving prostitute named Selina to switch careers, leaving the ‘cathouse’ (brothel) to become a costumed cat burglar. Finally, Batman narrowly escapes after being cornered in a tenement building and fire-bombed by Gordon’s superiors — just in time to save Gordon’s newborn baby from thugs, and thereby create an unofficial alliance between the two idealistic crime fighters, one in plain clothes, one in costume.

Despite Schumacher’s interest in using Year One as the basis for a darker, grittier adaptation, in the summer of 1999 Warner Bros asked New York filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, fresh from his breakthrough feature, Pi, how he might approach the Batman franchise. “I told them I’d cast Clint Eastwood as the Dark Knight, and shoot it in Tokyo, doubling for Gotham City,” he says, only half-joking. “That got their attention.” Whether inspired or undeterred, the studio was brave enough to open a dialogue with the avowed Bat-fan, who became interested in the idea of an adaptation of Year One.

“The Batman franchise had just gone more and more back towards the TV show, so it became tongue-in-cheek, a grand farce, camp,” says Aronofsky. “I pitched the complete opposite, which was totally bring-it-back-to-the-streets raw, trying to set it in a kind of real reality — no stages, no sets, shooting it all in inner cities across America, creating a very real feeling. My pitch was Death Wish or The French Connection meets Batman. In Year One, Gordon was kind of like Serpico, and Batman was kind of like Travis Bickle,” he adds, referring to police corruption whistle-blower Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino in the eponymous 1973 film, and Robert De Niro’s vigilante in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Aronofsky had already noted how Frank Miller’s acclaimed Sin City series had influenced his first film, Pi; in addition, the director already had a good working relationship with the writer/artist, since they had collaborated on an unproduced feature adaptation of Miller’s earlier graphic novel, Ronin. “Our take was to infuse the [Batman] movie franchise with a dose of reality,” Aronofsky says. “We tried to ask that eternal question: ‘What does it take for a real man to put on tights and fight crime?’”

The studio was intrigued enough to commission a screenplay, in which Aronofsky and Miller took a great many liberties, not only with the Year One comic book, but with Batman mythology in general. For a start, the script strips Bruce Wayne of his status as heir apparent to the Wayne Industries billions, proposing instead that the young Bruce is found in the street after his parents’ murder, and taken in by ‘Big Al’, who runs an auto repair shop with his son, ‘Little Al’. Driven by a desire for vengeance towards a manifest destiny of which he is only dimly aware, young Bruce (of deliberately indeterminate age) toils day and night in the shop, watching the comings and goings of hookers, johns, pimps and corrupt cops at a sleazy East End cathouse across the street, while chain-smoking detective James Gordon struggles with the corruption he finds endemic among Gotham City police officers of all ranks.

Bruce’s first act as a vigilante is to confront a dirty cop named Campbell as he accosts ‘Mistress Selina’ in the cathouse, but Campbell ends up dead and Bruce narrowly escapes being blamed. Realising that he needs to operate with more methodology, he initially dons a cape and hockey mask — deliberately suggestive of the costume of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th films. However, Bruce soon evolves a more stylised ‘costume’ with both form and function, acquires a variety of makeshift gadgets and weapons, and re-configures a black Lincoln Continental into a makeshift ‘Bat-mobile’ — complete with blacked-out windows, night vision driving goggles, armoured bumpers and a super-charged school bus engine. In his new guise as ‘The Bat-Man’, Bruce Wayne wages war on criminals from street level to the highest echelons, working his way up the food chain to Police Commissioner Loeb and Mayor Noone, even as the executors of the Wayne estate search for their missing heir. In the end, Bruce accepts his dual destiny as heir to the Wayne fortune and the city’s saviour, and Gordon comes to accept that, while he may not agree with The Bat-Man’s methods, he cannot argue with his results. “In the comic book, the reinvention of Gordon was inspired,” says Aronofsky, “because for the first time he wasn’t a wimp, he was a bad-ass guy. Gordon’s opening scene for us was [him] sitting on a toilet with the gun barrel in his mouth and six bullets in his hand, thinking about blowing his head off — and that to me is the character.”

The comic and the script have many scenes in common — including Bruce Wayne’s nihilistic narration (part Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, part Rorschach from that other great late 80s graphic novel, Watchmen), a heroic Gordon saving a baby during a hostage crisis, Selina as proto-Catwoman, the beating Gordon receives from fellow cops as a warning to give up his war on corruption, his suspicion that Harvey Dent is The Bat-Man, and the climactic battle in the tenement building. But it acts as a jumping-off point for a much grander narrative. Although the script removes the subplot of Gordon’s adultery, it goes further towards blurring the boundaries between accepted notions of good and evil: Gordon decries The Bat-Man’s vigilantism as the work of a terrorist whose actions put him outside the law, not above it, unaware that it was as much his own televised declaration of war on crime and corruption which inspired Bruce to vigilantism as the senseless and random murder of Bruce’s parents.

The script contains numerous references for Bat-fans, including a brief scene with a giggling green-haired inmate of Arkham Asylum, and goes a long way towards setting up a sequel, as Selina/Catwoman discovers the true identity of The Bat-Man. Interestingly, neither the comic book nor the script provide an entirely convincing argument for Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman: while Year One takes a more traditional approach — a bat smashes through the window of Bruce’s study — the script has Bruce take inspiration from the Bat-shaped mark produced by his signet ring (shades of Lee Falk’s superhero The Phantom) which leads the tabloids to dub him ‘The Bat-Man’.

In a rare interview, Miller told The Onion about working with Aronofsky. “He’s a ball,” he said. “Ideas just pour out of his ears. We tend to have a lot of fun together. It’s funny, because in many ways I think I’m the lighter one of the team, and I’m not used to that.” Although he would not talk about the content of the film “because I think Warner Brothers would have somebody beat me up,” he observed that asking a screenwriter what the movie would be like “is like asking a doorman whether a building is going to be condemned.” Nevertheless, Aronofsky believes that his and Miller’s approach would have made Tim Burton’s Batman look like a cartoon. “I think Tim did it very well,” he says, “especially on his second film, which I think is the masterpiece of the series. But it’s not reality. It’s totally Tim Burton’s world; a brilliant, well-polished Gothic perfection concoction. The first one did have a certain amount of reality, but there were still over-the-top fight sequences, and I wanted to have real fights, [explore] what happens when two men actually fight, which you just don’t see. Because once you start romanticising it and fantasising it into super-heroics, in the sense of good guys versus bad guys, and you’re not playing with the ambiguity of what is good and what is bad... I just could not find a way in for myself to tell that story.”

Of his own approach, Aronofsky admits, “I think Warners always knew it would never be something they could make. I think rightfully so, because four year-olds buy Batman stuff, so if you release a film like that, every four year-old’s going to be screaming at their mother to take them to see it, so they really need a PG property. But there was a hope at one point that, in the same way that DC Comics puts out different types of Batman titles for different ages, there might be a way of doing [the movies] at different levels. So I was pitching to make an R-rated adult fan-based Batman — a hardcore version that we’d do for not that much money. You wouldn’t get any breaks from anyone because it’s Warner Bros and it’s Batman, but you could do it for a smart price, raw and edgy, and make it more for fans and adults. Maybe shoot it on Super-16 [mm film format], and maybe release it after you release the PG one, and say ‘That’s for kids, and this one’s for adults.’” Nevertheless, he adds, “Warner Bros was very brave in allowing us to develop it, and Frank and I were both really happy with the script.”

In Burbank, Warner Bros was simultaneously pursuing an equally radical approach to its biggest franchise, as Aronofsky reveals. “They had a vision of a Matrix version that could have been really cool, but it just wasn’t something I was really interested in doing.” Aronofsky may be referring to the possibility of The Matrix writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski helming a Batman film — which Lorenzo di Bonaventura admitted “had crossed his mind” — perhaps even with Keanu Reeves in the role, a rumour which Reeves himself appeared to encourage when he told listings magazine TV Times how he would approach the role. “It’ll have to be dark, very sombre,” he said. “Something that’ll make people think twice about whether they’re actually watching a Batman film or not... I want to see more about what makes [him] tick — Bruce is far more than just your average wacko.” As for The Joker, he went on, “He’s the archetypal bad guy, the ‘Bat-nemesis’. He’s the dude with whom the Bat must battle — he’s in the film, or I’m not! And Jack Nicholson has to do it again, definitely.” Within days, Warner Bros sensibly dismissed talk of Keanu Reeves starring as Batman, causing rumour-mongers to turn their attention to an equally bogus suggestion: Ben Affleck. Speaking via his official website’s message board, the future star of Daredevil hastily dismissed the claim as “pure fiction. There is no Batman script, no movie being planned, [and] they have not called me or my agent.”

While the future of the live-action Batman remained up in the air, the Caped Crusader was flying high in a highly stylised and hugely successful TV show, Batman: The Animated Series, which amassed eighty-five half-hour episodes between 1992 and 1995, and spawned numerous feature-length spin-offs — beginning with the theatrically-released Batman: Mask of the Phantasm — and no fewer than four sister series. One of these, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett’s futuristic Batman Beyond (aka Batman of the Future) — in which an ageing Bruce Wayne hands over the Batman mantle to teenage protégé Terry McGinnis — caught the eye of the studio, which was soon considering the possibility of a live-action version. “I know that it’s one of the possible options that they have discussed on the lot,” Dini told Cinescape in November 1999, adding that no script had been written. “I don’t know what their plans are for it beyond just investigating several alternative ways to keep Batman going, as opposed to the way they’ve been doing the last two or three movies,” he added. “It’s a real idea that they’re considering, but no one has asked us to be involved with it.” Warner Bros registered several domain names related to Batman Beyond: The Movie, which were unconnected to the direct-to-video animated feature Batman Beyond: Return of The Joker, and in August 2000 Variety named Boaz Yakin, who had written a script for Marvel Comics’ The Punisher and directed the surprise hit Remember the Titans, as director of the live-action Batman Beyond. As co-creator Paul Dini told website Comics Continuum, “Boaz is co-writing the script with Alan Burnett and myself, as well as directing.” Although such a script was almost certainly completed, soon after Dini’s announcement the studio let it be known that it was no longer pursuing the Batman Beyond approach.

In the meantime, several former Batman interpreters threw their hats into the Bat-ring, with Val Kilmer expressing interest in returning to the role, while even George Clooney offering his own take on the next film: “You do the movie cheap, in a film noir style,” he told the Internet Movie Database. “Make Batman the Dark Knight, something Tim Burton didn’t even do. You start at Alfred’s burial, with a Sam Spade film noir narrator, talking to this Death figure standing there that only he sees. Go into the first big action set [piece] with Robin and he gets killed.” Clooney’s continuing contractual connection to the franchise did nothing to quell various rumours linking Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage, Aaron Eckhart (Erin Brockovich), Brendan Fehr (TV’s Roswell) and Christian Bale (American Psycho) to the role, despite the fact that neither Boaz Yakin nor Darren Aronofsky had ever discussed the potential casting of their stillborn projects.

With Year One and Batman Beyond both on the shelf, a more likely prospect seemed to be the big-screen team-up of DC Comics’ two biggest heroes, a cinematic equivalent of the popular World’s Finest title and the animated Batman/Superman adventures. The idea was first mooted in October 1998, when Jon Peters told Cinescape’s Beth Laski that a fifth Batman film was unlikely, “unless we put Batman and Superman together later.” Warner Bros evidently saw a team-up movie as more than just a tantalising possibility, but a viable way of bringing the Superman and Batman franchises out of the development mire. It was soon confirmed that the studio was excited about a script entitled Batman vs Superman, written by Se7en and Sleepy Hollow scribe Andrew Kevin Walker and subsequently ‘polished’ by Akiva Goldsman (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, A Beautiful Mind), in which the characters would begin as allies, albeit with radically different worldviews, before facing off in a showdown brought about by Bruce Wayne’s familiar desire to avenge the violent killing of a loved one.

The story begins five years into Bruce Wayne’s life post-Batman, having put his costume back into the closet following the death of Robin. He has settled down, married a woman named Elizabeth, and is happier than ever. Over in Metropolis, however, Superman has not been so lucky in love, having been dumped by Lois Lane due to the myriad difficulties of being Clark Kent’s girlfriend. When The Joker, previously thought dead, kills Elizabeth with a poison dart, Bruce takes it hard. First, he blames Superman, because the Man of Steel saved The Joker from a fatal beating just before the murder; second, he resumes the mantle of Batman — not, this time, under any pretence of metering out justice, but for the sheer cathartic pleasure of beating up bad guys. Superman, who has been busy wooing his first love, Lana Lang, in Smallville, tries to talk Bruce out of his vengeful ways, an act which ultimately pits the two heroes against each other. Eventually, it transpires that Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor was behind The Joker’s return, hoping that Batman and Superman would kill each other. Instead, the two heroes unite to defeat first The Joker, and finally Luthor, the man fundamentally behind Elizabeth’s death.

Opinions from Internet script reviewers were divided, either over the details of the Walker and Goldsman drafts, or the very idea of having Batman and Superman go mano a mano. Responding to an unfavourable review of Goldsman’s rewrite by Coming Attractions’ Darwin Mayflower, Batman on Film reporter ‘Jett’ said that, while he had not read the Goldsman draft, “I very much liked Walker’s original... I thought it was a very dark and powerful script and had a very clever way of pitting Batman against Superman. Mayflower flatly does not like the squaring off of Bats and Supes... [whereas] I found it quite exciting — plus you know that they are going to end up as allies in the end. Mayflower also has a problem with Goldsman’s (who many credit for the killing of the Bat-franchise with his p.o.s. Batman & Robin script) rewrites,” Jett added. “The only reason I can come up with why WB let Goldsman do rewrites was to lighten the script up a bit. Walker’s original — in my opinion — was dark. Perhaps WB thought too much so.”

Nevertheless, the studio was sufficiently excited about the script to postpone its plan for a new stand-alone Superman film and a fifth Batman in order to fast-track Batman vs Superman for a 2004 release, with Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm) at the helm. “It is the clash of the titans,” the German-born director told Variety in July 2002. “They play off of each other so perfectly. [Superman] is clear, bright, all that is noble and good, and Batman represents the dark, obsessive and vengeful side. They are two sides of the same coin and that is material for great drama.” Petersen subsequently spoke to MTV.com about his love for the Batman and Superman films, “especially in both cases the first two. I saw them over and over again.” Batman vs Superman, he added, would be part of the lore of the films and the comics, “but it’s also different. First of all, the dynamics are different because if they are in one movie together it changes a lot of things and it gives you a new perspective on superheroes... You also have the look and feel of Metropolis, the bright golden city, and the feel of Gotham, which is a shadowy, sinister city, in the same movie. This is Superman/Batman of the time after September 11th, also. It takes place in today or tomorrow’s world.”

Unsurprisingly, the announcement of a fast-tracked Batman vs Superman movie led to a surge of speculation as to which actors might don the respective capes. “We have a script that really very, very much concentrates on the characters,” Petersen told MTV.com. “It’s really material for two great actors.” Although he had previously cited Matt Damon as a possible star, Petersen later clarified that he was merely an example of the kind of actor he was looking for. “Someone who we so far did not really think of as a big action hero, who turned out to be a great actor who can also do great action... He’s one of these guys, but there’s a lot of these guys out there.” As far as the rumour-mills were concerned, Jude Law and Josh Hartnett were apparently front-runners to play Superman/Clark Kent, while Colin Farrell and Christian Bale — the latter previously connected with the Year One role — were widely mentioned for dual duties as Bruce Wayne and Batman. (“No, that’s Bateman, not Batman,” quipped Bale, referring to Patrick Bateman, his character in American Psycho.) Barely a month after the Variety announcement, however, Batman vs Superman seemed suddenly to have fallen out of favour with the studio, leading director Wolfgang Petersen to quit the project in favour of Troy, an epic retelling of Homer’s The Iliad starring Brad Pitt.

The studio’s swift about-face was based on a number of factors. Firstly, on 5 July, Alias creator J. J. Abrams had turned in the first eighty-eight pages of a new stand-alone Superman script, designed to be the first of a trilogy. Bob Brassel, a senior vice president for production at the studio, called producer Jon Peters, urging him to read the work-in-progress. “I did,” Peters told The New York Times, “and it was amazing. In a world of chaos, it’s about hope and light.” Abrams delivered the remaining fifty pages of the script in mid-July, just as Spider-Man began its amazing assault on box office records, suggesting that light and airy, not dark and powerful, was the way to go with superhero flicks. At that point, Peters, Abrams and Brassel met in the offices of executive vice president for worldwide motion pictures Lorenzo di Bonaventura — the man behind the Harry Potter and Matrix movies, and a long time champion of Batman vs Superman — who said that he liked the script (“It had more epic ambition than earlier Superman scripts,” he said later), but that he planned to release Batman vs Superman first. According to Peters, Abrams said, “You can’t do that,” suggesting that it was akin to releasing When Harry Divorced Sally before When Harry Met Sally.

Both sides had their points: with two iconic heroes for the price of one, Batman vs Superman arguably stood the better chance in a marketplace soon to be crowded with superhero films, ranging from Hulk to Daredevil, and more sequels featuring Spider-Man and The X-Men; however, if the darker sensibility of Batman vs Superman did not connect with audiences, it could effectively kill both franchises before they had had a chance to be revived. Besides, if either Batman or Superman failed, the studio would still have the team-up movie to fall back on. As studio president Alan Horn told The New York Times, “In reintroducing these characters we wanted to do what was in the best interest of the company.” Thus, in early August, Horn asked ten senior studio executives — representing international and domestic theatrical marketing, consumer products and home video — to read both scripts, and decide which of them stood the better chance in the post-Spider-Man marketplace. “I wanted some objectivity,” Horn explained. “Why not get an opinion or two?” At the meeting, di Bonaventura argued in favour of Batman vs Superman; others, however, felt that Abrams’ three-part Superman story had better long-term prospects for toy, DVD and ancilliary sales. Besides, even if the majority had not favoured the Superman script, Horn had the casting vote. “I said I wanted to do Superman,” he told The New York Times. “At the end of the day it’s my job to decide what movies we make.”

The plan, Horn later told The Hollywood Reporter, was that Superman, the long-mooted Catwoman spin-off, and “a Batman origins movie” (presumably Year One) would revive both franchises, paving the way for a team-up movie. “I’d like to think that each character will evolve so that when we have Batman vs Superman, the meeting of the two will feel more organic,” he said. Peters, the former hairdresser and Batman producer who had toiled through the development of a Superman film for eight years, was moved to tears when Alan Horn phoned to tell him the news. “I swear I heard the flapping of angel wings when Alan was talking,” he said. Peters, in turn, called Christopher Reeve, who had played Superman in four films between 1978 and 1987, and had recently guest-starred on the small-screen Superman show Smallville, despite a crippling spinal injury he suffered in a fall from a horse. “He told me that his original idea was to do a film of Superman vs Batman,” Reeve later recalled. “They were pretty far into it, and then Jon saw that documentary that my son made about me and how five years after the injury I started to move.” According to Reeve, Peters began to rethink the idea: “‘Why should [they] have two superheroes fighting?’[1] The movie that Warner Bros is making now will be a much more uplifting and spiritual story.” In August, Warner Bros officially switched off Batman vs Superman’s green light. Days later, on 4 September, its greatest champion, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, quit after twelve years at the studio, giving credence to the widespread speculation that Horn vs di Bonaventura — an epic battle of wills between two of the studios biggest guns over two of its biggest assets — had contributed to his departure.

Where all this left the Batman franchise was unclear. Almost anyone, it seemed, was invited to apply for the vacancy of the next film’s screenwriter, and even Grant Morrison, author of one of the biggest selling graphic novels of all time, Arkham Asylum, threw his hat into the ring. “My own movie agent at Creative Artists Agency submitted a treatment I’d entitled Batman: Year Zero, which had a young Batman travelling around the world, slowly assembling the familiar components of his outfit and disguise in the year before returning to Gotham as its protector.” As a change from The Joker or the Penguin, Morrison’s villains were Ra’s al-Ghul and Man-Bat from Denny O’Neil’s widely acclaimed Batman stories of the 1970s. Although Morrison’s application was unsuccessful, the team which was assigned the restoration of the Bat-franchise evidently agreed with his approach, electing to return to Batman’s roots as part of their restoration effort.

It was in early 2003 that Warner Bros revealed the new curator of the Bat-franchise: Christopher Nolan, director of the tricksy Memento and a well-received remake of Scandinavian thriller Insomnia. “All I can say is that I grew up with Batman,” Nolan commented. “I’ve been fascinated by him and I’m excited to contribute to the lore surrounding the character. He is the most credible and realistic of the superheroes, and has the most complex human psychology. His superhero qualities come from within. He’s not a magical character.” Although Variety also reported that both Year One[2] and Catwoman — the latter scripted by John Rogers (The Core), starring Ashley Judd (later to be replaced by Halle Berry) and directed by visual effects veteran Pitof — were also on the cards, Nolan’s untitled Batman project[3] seemed the most likely to move forward, although it remained unclear which script would form the basis of the film. Nolan, who knew Batman but was uncertain about his wider comic book context, turned to David S. Goyer, who scripted Dark City, The Crow: City of Angels, the comic book adaptation Blade and its sequels, and unused drafts of Freddy vs Jason, for help with the script. Ironically, Goyer, whose lifelong dream had been to write a Batman movie script, was unavailable, preparing to direct Blade: Trinity — but agreed to give Nolan some ideas pro bono. As Goyer recalls, “I said, ‘If I did do it, this is what I would do, and you can have my ideas for free.’ I talked for about an hour and spitballed a large amount of what the film is, and Chris said, ‘Wow, that sounds great.’ He went away again for a few more days, [then] I got a call saying, ‘You have to do this.’” Goyer carved out the time to write the first draft of the script.

The Nolan-Goyer Batman set out to achieve something no comic book or film had accomplished thus far: tell a definitive origin story, charting the journey from the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents all the way to the formation of Batman as a masked vigilante. Drawing heavily on the comic book history of the character, Nolan and Goyer filled in the blanks, working with Nolan’s regular production designer Nathan Crowley to build a Batman story from the ground up — exactly the approach which Warner Bros wanted to re-boot its biggest property. Released on 5 June 2005, Batman Begins made just over $200 million at the US box office — fifty million dollars (and a few million audience members) short of Burton’s Batman, but a healthy start to what would, with The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) signal the return of the bat to box office dominance — not only among its comic book peers, but Hollywood in general. Sixteen years since Tim Burton’s Batman gave birth to the film franchise and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin killed it off, the Dark Knight had returned — with a vengeance.

_____________

1 The fact that Peters could wonder why audiences might want to see superheroes fighting arguably shows the Batman producer’s failure to understand one of the greatest appeals of comic books.

2
Batman: Year One would eventually be made as a direct-to-video animated feature, released in October 2011.

3
Batman Begins was famously filmed under the codename The Intimidation Game, which many fans mistook as the actual title of the new Bat-film

TOMB RAIDER CHRONICLES

Why making the leap to the big screen was the toughest challenge Lara Croft had ever faced

“We should have made a better movie.”

— Tomb Raider producer Lloyd Levin

Computer and video games have never made the best source for movies; whether commercially successful or not, they are, almost without exception, reliably awful. Of course, since Hollywood is a business rather than an artistic endeavour, this has not prevented producers from going big game hunting, trying to turn a profit by turning video games into big screen blockbusters.

Although the computer revolution inspired such films as Tron, The Last Starfighter and WarGames, the first brand name computer game conversion did not appear until 1993’s Super Mario Bros, in which Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo gamely stepped into the shoes of Nintendo’s Italian plumbers, who had taken the gaming world by storm in the mid-1980s. Although the film failed to repeat the console game’s success, big-screen adaptations of Double Dragon and Street Fighter soon followed, and in 1995, British director Paul Anderson’s movie adaptation of the smash hit ‘beat-em-up’ game Mortal Kombat scored a phenomenal opening weekend, despite the universal derision the film received from critics. One would expect such a success to drive Hollywood executives to begin raiding arcades and game stores for ideas — but, aside from a rash of animated and/or direct-to-video releases, from Pokémon to Sonic the Hedgehog and Tekken, the 1990s produced only three other live-action video game adaptations: a Mortal Kombat sequel, a Japanese Fatal Fury film, and an ill-starred adaptation of the popular Wing Commander PC game.

The thinking behind such an enterprise was simple: not only did brands like Super Mario Bros and Mortal Kombat have a ready-made international fan base, the properties tended to appeal most to Hollywood’s most highly prized demographic: young males. If you played computer games, the logic went, you probably also went to the cinema, and vice versa — a theory borne out by the vast number of hit movies, from Ghostbusters to Goldeneye, converted into successful console games. One persistent problem, however, was that video gamers were a notoriously fickle bunch, even in the late 1990s, and by the time a movie adaptation reached the screen, a new game — or even a new console — had reached the shelves. Suddenly, Sonic the Hedgehog looked about as cutting edge as Pong. Eventually, the studios wised up and decided to wait for a gargantuan global gaming success before swooping in for the movie rights. Finally, in November 1996, a star was born, as the mostly male gaming population got its first female hero. Lara Croft was her name. And Tomb Raider was her game.

The brainchild of Simon Channing-Williams, Lara Croft was conceived at the offices of Eidos Interactive in early 1995, and developed as a game by a team of Core Design programmers, including Toby Gard. Part James Bond, part Indiana Jones, part glamour model, the luscious Lara was a twenty-something British aristocrat-cum-adventurer who eschewed the life of a débutante in favour of self-financed expeditions in which she braved lethal traps, dangerous creatures and treacherous rivals in order to steal relics from ancient burial sites.

Lara made her console début in November 1996, in what was essentially a platform game, the platform in question being the PlayStation,[1] Sony’s first entry into the risky but potentially lucrative console market, then dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Tomb Raider became an overnight success, propelling the pistol-packing virtual sex symbol Lara Croft to international stardom. Four sequels — Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and Tomb Raider Chronicles — appeared year-on-year from 1997 to 2000, by which time Lara had become the most iconic figure in the history of console games, selling more than twenty million games worldwide, appearing on more than 200 magazine covers, advertising products around the world, and appearing as the sole virtual entity on a Time Digital list of the fifty most important people in the cyber industry and a Details magazine list of the world’s sexiest women. In the adventures themselves, she had travelled the globe from the frozen ruins embedded in an Arctic glacier to a forgotten valley filled with supposedly extinct creatures in a South American rainforest. It was only a matter of time before she found her way to Hollywood.

Such was the success of the first Tomb Raider game that rumours of a movie began as early as March 1997, less than six months after Lara Croft’s début appearance. By September of that year, model turned actress Elizabeth Hurley became the first in a long line of actresses to be linked to the role, swiftly followed by such diverse names as Diane Lane, Sandra Bullock, Denise Richards, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Famke Janssen, Anna Nicole Smith, Demi Moore, Jennifer Lopez and Rhona Mitra, who dressed up as Lara at trade shows. Yet it was not until March 1998 that fan site The Croft Times broke the news: after one of the fiercest bidding wars in recent Hollywood history — for which, in a testament to the power of the brand, interested parties were required to come up with not just the money, but also ideas and approaches to the material — the film rights had finally been sold to Paramount Pictures. Tomb Raider: The Movie looked set to become more than virtual reality.

Making its official announcement a few days later, Eidos confirmed that it had entered into an agreement to license the worldwide film rights to Paramount, with plans to produce a live-action feature film, laying rest to rumours that the film might be computer-animated, like Pixar’s recently-released Toy Story. “Mr Lawrence Gordon and Mr Lloyd Levin will produce the action adventure,” the press release stated, referring to the prolific producers behind two 48 HRS films, two Die Hards and two Predators. John Goldwyn, president of Paramount Motion Pictures, said, “We are thrilled by the possibilities of this film project. We are confident that the pairing of Eidos, a leading company in the cutting-edge world of video game (sic), and producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, will result in a ground-breaking live-action adventure movie with worldwide appeal.” Paramount had good reason to put the movie on the development ‘fast track’, since its deal with Eidos stipulated that if the project did not move through development at a certain pace, the rights would automatically expire. Thus, by March, the studio had already hired a screenwriter: Brent V. Friedman, co-writer of the console-game inspired sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

Friedman’s first draft opens at a London boarding school in 1986 as sixteen year-old Lara, an expert gymnast and A-student, regales her classmates with vivid stories of her parents’ daring exploits. These are soon revealed to be products of her over-active imagination, since her parents (Lord Desmond and Lady Vivian Croft) are not globe-trotting relic hunters but vacationing souvenir collectors, who attempt to make up for years of neglect by offering to take Lara on holiday anywhere in the world. Lara’s choice, Tibet, turns out to be an unfortunate one: their plane crashes in the Himalayas, killing Lady Vivian and injuring Lord Desmond, whom she attempts to pull to safety on a makeshift sled-cum-stretcher. An attack by snow leopards gives audiences an early demonstration of Lara’s precocious resourcefulness, as she uses one of her trademark flares to chase away the predators — only for Lord Croft to expire in front of the gates of a monastery, where a Tibetan monk named Karak takes in the newly-orphaned girl. From here, the script leaps forward thirteen years to the Croft Estate in Hampshire, where an older, wiser Karak now serves as twenty-nine year-old Lara’s trainer, guardian and companion, like Batman’s Ra’s Al-Ghul and Alfred rolled into one.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, a grey-haired seventy year-old Scot named Darby Erikson, a role apparently tailor-made for a Sean Connery cameo, sends Lara a videotaped message, alerting her to his discovery of a map which he believes might lead to El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous Australian named Larsen (the name of the evil Texan from the first Tomb Raider game) is on his trail, and Erikson offers Lara a fifty-fifty split on the lost Incan gold, hoping to appeal to her charitable nature. Against Karak’s advice, Lara takes the job, but before she goes, she pays a visit to Stuart, Liam and Wesley, three engineering eggheads — dead ringers for The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen — who build gadgets and gizmos from designs drawn up by Lara, with whom they are besotted. Before she can leave for Curaçao, where she must meet up with Darby, she returns home to find assassins prowling her estate, now inexplicably rigged with deadly traps. Of course, it’s soon revealed to be the work of Karak and the gardening staff — presumably all part of her training.

Arriving in Curaçao, Lara finds Erikson dead, and narrowly avoids meeting the same fate. Although Erikson’s map has been stolen, she digitally enhances the one on his videotape, and follows it to Ecuador, where she purchases the services of Dodge, a rugged American guide as trustworthy as his name suggests, and sets off up the Napo river in pursuit of the murderous Larsen and his fellow Aussies. After an eventful boat ride, during which the pair fend off deadly alligators and narrowly escape being sucked into a whirlpool, Lara ends up one step ahead of Larsen and his malevolent boss, Malvern, both of whom have failed to realise that magnetic north has shifted four degrees since 1523, when the map was made, and that a lake featured on the map was drained by a volcanic earthquake in 1814. Entering through a volcanic fissure, Lara and Dodge discover Incan stone formations dating from the early 16th century, and make their way through a series of increasingly elaborate and ingenious traps. Finally breaching the tomb of Manco, an Incan king, Lara discovers that El Dorado does not mean ‘Golden City,’ but ‘Golden Man’ — a reference to Manco himself, who discovered the secret of alchemy, turning base metals into gold. She offers Dodge the same fifty-fifty split Erikson offered her, if he will accompany her on the next stage of her journey: a trip even further into darkest Peru to search for Manco’s alchemical device, a magical bowl known as ‘The Black Veil’.

Of course, there are further revelations to come. No sooner have Lara and Dodge found the magical device than Malvern and Larsen turn up to claim their prize, revealing Dodge to be a traitor in their employ. Dodge regrets his betrayal, however, having grown fond of Lara during their shared exploits, and engineers her escape, getting himself shot in the process. With echoes of her struggle to save her father, Lara refuses to leave Dodge behind, dragging him to safety and sneaking aboard Malvern’s ship, where a last revelation awaits her: that Malvern is using the Black Veil not to turn non-precious metals into gold, but into an altogether more lucrative, dangerous and distinctly twentieth century treasure: weapons grade plutonium! Several daring escapes and one nuclear explosion later, Lara returns home, where she swaps her trademark outfit — shorts, a form-fitting Lycra top, boots and mirror shades — for a long evening dress, to attend a society cocktail party thrown by her paternal aunt. After giving her bemused aunt the Black Veil for safe keeping, Lara makes her final escape — to a pub, where she fulfills an earlier promise to share a pint with ‘The Gadget Boys’ — further endearing herself to them by downing hers in one.

Friedman delivered his 108-page first draft on 17 July 1998. By 1 October, the popular website Ain’t It Cool had posted a withering script review, courtesy of ‘Agent 4125.’ “I’m sorry to report that the content is every bit as old and dusty as the ancient artefacts that Lara pursues in her gaming adventures,” the reviewer claimed, taking issue with Friedman’s deviation from previously known Tomb Raider lore, such as the way Lara Croft’s parents are killed. “On its own, this would only be a small matter, but there are plenty of other deviations and a general disregard for the Tomb Raider mythos throughout the script.” Agent 4125 dismissed the Lara/Karak relationship as “an awkward contrivance” and “a lame take-off of the whole David Carradine/Grasshopper schtick from Kung-Fu,” and likened Karak’s surprise attack on Lara at Croft Mansion to Kato ambushing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films.

By the time the story gets to South America, Agent 4125 went on, “it seems like a mix of Predator-style chase set-pieces in the jungle, and an obligatory series of tricks and traps as Lara navigates her way through a subterranean temple.” (But not, one assumes, in a good way.) The reviewer acknowledged, grudgingly, the fact that Friedman’s greatest challenge arguably lay in the fact that, with the exception of the gender of its hero, Tomb Raider was a thinly-disguised knock-off of the Indiana Jones movies, “but Friedman doesn’t even seem to be trying — [Lara] even has a colourful peasant guide to follow her around and be amazed by her ingenuity in defeating the various traps (just like Satipo at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark).” Although Agent 4125 conceded that Lara’s level of flirtatious banter with Dodge was “about the one part of her character that they got right,” the rest of her characterisation was “wrong, wrong, wrong... she relies way too much on contrived James Bond-style high-tech gadgets than her own ingenuity and her motivation is... well, a mystery. It’s never really explained why she does these things that she does, or who it is she’s trying to help. She just kinda... does them.” Summing up, the reviewer described the script as “shoddy... a cross between Allan Quatermain (remember that?) and Anaconda, with lots of steamy jungle, perilous situations and a whole ton of characters you really couldn’t care less about.”

Clearly, Agent 4125 did not appreciate the obstacles in Friedman’s path, nor the structural gymnastics and character revisionism that might be necessary to convert a one- (or, at best two-) dimensional computer game character into a three-dimensional live-action movie icon. One obvious challenge was that, in the games, Lara’s is a largely solitary pursuit (much like gaming itself), making it difficult to create effective scenarios for dialogue, a movie mainstay. Friedman solves the problem by making Lara reactive rather than pro-active in verbal situations, preferring to let actions speak louder than words. And action is the operative word, as Lara tackles tricks and traps, each highly evocative of her console-based adventures, with an equally typical combination of problem-solving skills and gymnastic expertise.

Scenes most typical of Lara’s games heritage include a two-gun shoot-out with subterranean rats, a scuba diving sequence complete with harpoon gun and modified oxygen tank, and a sliding wall trap which snags her trademark pony-tail; these, along with quips like “Next time don’t send boys to do a girl’s work,” and Lara’s flirtatious dialogue with Dodge, seemed to prove that Friedman had done his homework, capturing the elusive spirit of Lara Croft in word and deed. Nevertheless, on 11 December 1998, a little over two months after Ain’t It Cool published Agent 4125’s negative review, the same site reported that Friedman had left the project, with another pseudonymous scooper (‘ArchChancellor Ridcully’) implying a causal link between one fan’s assessment of a first draft script and Friedman’s subsequent departure. Not so, says Friedman.

“I’d love to give you the whole story, but I’ll spare myself the agony,” he told Premiere magazine. The writer went on to explain that, twenty minutes after Paramount approved his script, he received a call from producer Lawrence Gordon, who asked him to “forget what Paramount says” and come up with more economically viable ideas. The studio, meanwhile, insisted that he continue working on the original concept. “The last thing you want to do is get caught in these tug-of-wars,” Friedman added, “because you’re a writer, a nobody — just a casualty of war.” Friedman did, however, try to reach a compromise with a second take on the film, but a week after Paramount approved the new draft, Eidos — which retained approval over script, director and star — rejected the script, for unspecified reasons. “My sense is, of all the people I met with, only one of the core group of producers and executives had played the game,” Friedman explained. “But everybody has a different interpretation of what will make a lot of money.”

In the meantime, Paramount had hired a female screenwriter, former X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation scriptwriter Sara B. Charno (now Sara B. Cooper), to work on an alternative take. When she struck out, the studio knew that if the next writer did not hit a home run, it was game over. Thus, they went straight to the A-list, hiring Steven de Souza, who had worked with Gordon on such blockbusters as Die Hard and The Running Man, and had previously tackled another computer games conversion, Street Fighter. “I was hired in September 1998 to do a story, treatment, draft, rewrite and polish,” says de Souza. “All that took six months, and I turned in my revised, polished script the first week of March 1999. The reaction to the script was universally positive, and it was the document that Stephen Herek read and which he signed on to film.” In other words, he adds, “My script was the one that broke the dam of all the Development Hell.”

By this time, de Souza says that rising star Angelina Jolie, who had co-starred in Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector and Girl, Interrupted, was everyone’s first choice for Lara. No mention was made of Jolie, however, in a Variety story, dated 11 April 1999, which reported that Stephen Herek, director of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Mr. Holland’s Opus, was close to a deal to direct the Tomb Raider movie, with summer 2000 the target release date. “Several scribes took a shot at adapting the vidgame,” the report stated, “[but] it wasn’t until Steven de Souza submitted his draft that Paramount deemed the project ready for a director to come on board, according to Paramount Motion Picture Group president John Goldwyn.”

‘Necros,’ a script reviewer for the website Coming Attractions, shared Goldwyn’s enthusiasm. “Thankfully,” the review began, “de Souza’s Tomb Raider does not begin with a silly and unnecessary backstory on Lara Croft. After a short ‘hook’ to set up the bad guys, we plunge right into a near-perfect cinematic realization of the best parts of the original TR computer game as Lara makes her way through the cavernous tomb of King Philip and retrieves the King’s funeral mask. When she returns home, she learns that her life may be in danger, and during the subsequent exhibition at the British Museum, a foreign minister from Kafiristan (the small third world country that Lara took the mask from) explains to Lara the mask’s significance — that it may lead the way to the long-lost library of Alexander the Great. Lara’s old nemesis, Larson (the arrogant Texan featured in the original game), steals the mask from the museum that night, and it is now up to Lara to find the lost library before Larson can. She gathers a small expedition team and sets out to find it, running into many difficult obstacles — some expected and some quite unexpected — along the way.

“Overall, this is an excellent script,” the review concluded. “De Souza does a nice job of characterising Lara, and while the plot has touches of both the Indiana Jones and James Bond films, it never feels like a rip-off of either series. Nor does the script suffer from an overdose of humour (although Lara has some great one-liners). It’s a good, solid action-adventure story with a refreshing emphasis on adventure. With steady-handed direction and some good stunt choreography, TR could turn out to be one of summer 2000’s real gems.”

Despite the anonymous Coming Attraction critic’s approval — Necros could, after all, have been de Souza in disguise — producer Lloyd Levin remained unconvinced that de Souza’s draft was ready for a green light. “We hadn’t gotten to the place where we were embracing what was special about the game, which was the character and how contemporary she was,” he told Premiere magazine. “We kept falling back on stories and types of movies that were familiar.” This was, perhaps, understandable, given that Tomb Raider itself had been a deliberate attempt to remake Indiana Jones in the image of a sexy young woman, and that all versions of the game had borrowed freely from adventure movies from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Romancing the Stone. In other words, the producers were trying to make a movie based on a video game inspired by movies. How to make that seem original?

Herek, of course, had his own opinions of what a Tomb Raider movie should look like. By this time, however, Steven de Souza had technically fulfilled his contract, giving Herek licence to bring in a new screenwriter, who would be cheaper and more accessible than the producer’s choice. “Another motivation may have been — and of course I’m guessing here — Herek secretly wanted a writer less firmly in the producer’s camp than me,” de Souza explains. “My having done half a dozen pictures with Larry Gordon made Herek start to think that perhaps he should have a writer on board who would report to him, and not Gordon.” It didn’t help matters that, during this period, Gordon’s comic book adaptation Mystery Men belly-flopped at the box office, weakening Gordon’s standing with Paramount. De Souza says that Gordon wanted to re-hire him, “possibly because I would be his guy in the shifting sand of studio politics post-Mystery Men,” but that his hands were tied. In any case, de Souza was no longer available, being buried in pre-production on his own film, Possessed, which he was also directing.

Whatever the reason, Gordon and Levin gave the next draft to two screenwriters at the opposite end of the spectrum: Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who had adapted the pioneering wireframe arcade game Battle Zone into a screenplay for Lloyd Levin. At the pitch for Battle Zone, Massett and Zinman recall being drawn to a life-size cutout of Lara Croft behind Lloyd Levin’s desk, and — even though they were unfamiliar with the game — decided to pitch for Tomb Raider: The Movie. As Zinman told Creative Screenwriting, “[The producers] said, ‘The situation is this: we’re running out of rope; we’re looking to make a deal with someone who can give us some security.’ They were very up front in saying, ‘No one is going to roll the dice on you at this point.’ Massett and Zinman chose not to take ‘no’ for an answer, writing a forty-page ‘scriptment’ — roughly half way between a treatment and a script — while their agent set up a pitch meeting with the producers. “Scene for scene, beat for beat, we told [them] the movie... from the opening to the final sequence,” Massett said of the meeting. “We were riffing off each other the whole time. It was tight, like a forty-minute Jimi Hendrix show.” According to Massett, neither producer spoke during the pitch, or after it; yet before the writers had left the studio lot, their agent called to say they had the go-ahead to turn their pitch into a script.

Only when they had the assignment did Massett and Zinman actually sit down to play the games, which Massett summarised as “a lot of puzzle solving; a bad guy tries to stop her, or beat her to the prize.” The film, they felt, should be equally simple: “It was a franchise. It was cool. It was a chick as an action star.” As Zinman explained, “The challenge is to create a story that’s not going to alienate the fan base. But by the same token we wanted to expand the audience to people who weren’t familiar with the game. Something we did incorporate was Lara’s intelligence,” he added. “Her success as an action hero is that she isn’t just brawn. She figures things out; she’s the smartest one in the room. I think that’s the challenge of the game, that’s why people get addicted to it.”

Seventeen days after getting the job, Massett and Zinman turned in their first draft, at which point, according to Zinman, they were “hailed as heroes.” Not so, says de Souza. “Massett and Zinman’s first attempt was not well received,” he counters, adding that it followed his draft in general, keeping the Alexander the Great idea but changing the ‘MacGuffin’ — Hitchcock’s term for the motivating factor of most stories — from Archimedes’ Mirror to Achilles’ Shield, an artefact Massett and Zinman learned about in a PBS special on the Macedonian conqueror. “Of course, the whole point of the MacGuffin isn’t what it is, but how it is used and where it takes you,” says de Souza. “So my original idea — that Alexander the Great stumbled on something very dangerous and hid it to protect civilization, hiding the only clue under the sea — led to a series of scenes and adventures that hardly changed in draft after draft.”

Massett and Zinman were subsequently replaced by Face/Off scribes Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, who worked with Herek developing a new draft, subsequently reviewed by one ‘Darwin Mayflower’ on the website Screenwriters Utopia. “The script opens in Macedonia, 632 BC. Alexander the Great is mad with power: he has an ancient, supernatural breastplate, the Shield of Achilles, that makes him invulnerable. Alexander has begun to kill his own people, to feed the demon-dog Cerberus, and two of his men, Priam and Sophius, decide enough is enough and plot to take him down. They eventually do, with the help of one of Alexander’s consorts, and break the breastplate into three pieces and bury them at the furthest reaches of the earth.”

Cut to the present day, in which Lara Croft is re-imagined as a Robin Hood-style figure who returns stolen artefacts to their rightful owners — the Shield of Achilles being the subject of her latest quest. “Her frail Uncle Charles Powell hooks her up with the bookish Dr Alexis Toulin, who works for the Greek Ministry of Antiquities. Alexander’s tomb has been found and Alexis fears that the three sections of breastplate, one of which Lara unknowingly found, might end up in the wrong hands (anyone who possesses it is invulnerable, remember).” Lara sets off for Morocco with Dr Toulin, gatecrashing a party taking place above a cave containing the second piece of the breastplate. Ultimately, Mayflower added, “Dr Toulin winds up being a criminal. Her Uncle is in on it, too (he’s dying and wants the breastplate so he can go on living). Lara gets together with the good-guy-she-thought-to-be-bad, [Theo] Rooker. And together ... they track down the Shield of Achilles and try to stop Alexis and his dangerous wife.”

Mayflower went on to describe Werb and Colleary’s take on Lara herself as “a wonderful contradiction. She’s beautiful but alone; she can speak six languages and knows her mythology like an average person knows his days of the week ... she’s ready to take on any challenge, but won’t accept a man in her life. Lara’s parents died in a plane crash,” he added. “Their bodies were never discovered and their empty mausoleum is like a self-torturing device to remind Lara her life with her parents never had a conclusion. Her butler dramatically tells her she helps find things for people because she’s really looking for her parents.” Unfortunately, he added, “Lara’s problems aren’t dealt with, and she just becomes another piece in the plot-puzzle. The lost-parents rap is also a little stupid: sure, it sucks to never find your parents’ bodies, but she has accepted they are dead, and grieving over finding the mangled corpses of your loved ones isn’t the best activity for a buxom heroine. Lara later runs into — wow! totally by accident! — those dead parents. And it’s once again not a stroke of paint in Lara’s personality, but another plot point.

“You’re not asking much with a Tomb Raider movie,” Mayflower added. “You want to sit down and see [Lara] kill bad guys, just make it under a gate as it’s closing, and spout some cool one-liners. That the authors couldn’t give us at least that much is both disappointing and baffling.” Although impressed by an early scene which places Lara in an ancient-ruins-themed casino — and another in which Lara is tortured by being tied to a post while centipedes crawl up her body, only to crush one of them with her ample cleavage — Mayflower’s overall disappointment was clear. “There’s just not much going on,” he lamented. “And when it does, it’s Lara in some hackneyed action scene we’ve watched twenty years ago and were just as bored then as we are now.”

According to de Souza, this draft spent a huge amount of time, “like twenty-eight pages!” in ancient times with Alexander and company, “sort of like The Mummy did before Brendan Fraser even showed up. This drove the studio crazy, because they were negotiating to pay Angelina Jolie a record price to be in a ninety-minute movie, and now at the eleventh hour Herek wanted to take away a third of her time on screen, and replace it with millions of dollars of actors, sets and costumes that were all — essentially — a prologue!” Nevertheless, The Mummy had, against most predictions, proven to be a huge international success for a rival studio, Universal, and it was perhaps unsurprising that Paramount were willing to take the Tomb Raider film in a new direction. In the meantime, however, Herek dropped out to direct Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star, leaving Tomb Raider with a ‘hard’ release date — a target date which a studio has marked out for a particular film’s release, and which it us unwilling to shift — but no director. “It was the worst situation,” de Souza states. “The movie was due out the following summer, so it had to start in September or October of that year. That’s so far into the process, you can’t even shop for directors — even if you say, ‘Who’s available?’ and start interviewing people, that takes six weeks.”

It was at this point that someone at the studio remembered that British director Simon West, who had made the smash hit Con Air and, for Paramount, The General’s Daughter, was stuck in Development Hell on another Paramount project. West owed the studio a movie, so he would be available relatively cheaply, given that the price for that unnamed film had already been fixed. Thus, says de Souza, “Paramount threw Simon West off a postponed film also on the lot and rolled his deal over to Tomb Raider — a move which, at the time, seemed both wise and efficient.” West, however, did not like the direction the Tomb Raider script was taking. “The old drafts had a lot of ‘Mary Poppins’ representations of England,” he told Premiere. “It was fairly horrendous. I said, ‘Look, I want to change everything but the title and the character.’ I had to come up with it very quickly.”

“As soon as he was locked into it,” says de Souza, ”he took off his nice guy mask and completely hi-jacked the movie. He says all the right things to get the job, and once he’s in he says, ‘It’s a piece of shit. I could write the script myself.’” Whether West was aggrieved that he had been manoeuvred into directing a potential blockbuster under the terms of an existing deal — meaning that he would not get the kind of payday he expected from a film like Tomb Raider — or whether he genuinely did not like the script, was unclear. In any case, says de Souza, “he demanded he be given an additional paycheck to write his own script, in lieu of the one already in ‘prep’ — mine.”

West, who had spent more than a year developing a film based on 1960s TV series The Prisoner, made no secret of his initial scepticism at the prospect of taking on Tomb Raider. “Every time it came up I thought that we must really be desperate if we’re looking to video games for film ideas,” he commented. “I was a real prejudiced snob about it. No film based on a video game has ever worked.” Neither did reading earlier drafts endear the project to him. “[One of them] had scenes with people visiting the Queen and drinking tea,” West told Dreamwatch magazine. “It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

Describing his own vision of Tomb Raider: The Movie as “James Bond on acid” and “James Bond as it should be — slightly sadistic, supercool, with a surreal element,” he said he had read all of the previous drafts, and decided that Massett and Zinman’s was the one he liked best. As a result, West holed up in a London hotel room and bashed out yet another script, which — according to a synopsis posted on Coming Attractions — combined elements of several earlier drafts. “The plot, briefly, involves adventuress/magazine editor Lara Croft’s pursuit of the death mask of Alexander the Great,” the report stated. “The mask was split into three pieces when Alex’s hidden tomb was sealed to protect it from raiders (the closing of the tomb opens the film). The pieces of the mask were spread around the world. Lara unwittingly has one piece of the mask in a relic she takes in her introductory action sequence. The piece comes to her attention when a Greek man named Darius offers to buy the piece and, when she refuses to sell, he steals it. Lara then has to figure out what the piece is and find the other pieces before Darius.

“Darius wants to find the tomb because Alexander is said to have possessed the Shield of Achilles, which makes its holder invulnerable. Lara makes good use of her family butler, Jeeves, and a reluctant archaeologist friend she once had an affair with, Justin, to hunt down the mask pieces. The movie is full of action sequences with Lara finding her way through the tombs with Darius’ men in pursuit... The final showdown is a bit hokey, as a plunge off a cliff ends with Lara saving herself with the shield. The plot is really an excuse for the action scenes, which range from the Middle East to the Khyber Pass to some nifty underwater work. The biggest problem with the movie is that Lara herself does not act particularly sexy and there is no real heat between her and Justin or even her and Darius. It’s very PG in that respect. Fans may like to know that the script does show Lara grieving for her dead, rich parents and has her work as editor of an adventure magazine where she publishes accounts of her exploits. All in all,” the report concluded, “this project needs some more work to make it stand out. Otherwise, it’ll turn out to be just another action flick.”

Few were surprised when the release date slipped again, this time to the summer of 2001. Perhaps nervous that the studio may tire of their inability to shepherd the film into production, Gordon and Levin called in a series of ‘closers’ — Mission: Impossible 2 scribe Brannon Braga, future Avatar co-screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, and Academy Award nominee Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show) — who continued to massage the script. According to de Souza, Mike Werb and Michael Colleary worked briefly with West, an experience they reportedly described as “horrible”. Says de Souza, “Mike Werb said, ‘The movie’s called Tomb Raider, and there’s no tombs and there’s no raiding,’ and Simon West said, ‘That’s my plan — I don’t want to be obvious.’ Other writers had told me that they would sit in a room with Simon West where they would say, ‘You can’t do that, it ruins the surprise,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want any surprises in this movie — that’s twentieth century. This is a twenty-first century movie. We’re not here to surprise or play games with the audience or shock them or talk about characters and motivation — this is just pure kinetic energy and momentum.’”

Basically, de Souza adds, “West went back to the scripts that were abandoned, and did a cut and paste and put them all together, and did his own rewriting across the top of it. He invented the storyline about the antediluvian Conan-esque Hyborean Age prehistory ‘triangle of light’ that was made from a meteor, and (with Angelina) added all the father/daughter scenes. Nobody wanted him to do that, but nobody could stop him. The studio was happy [with the script], but he kept saying, ‘I want another rewrite.’ He was driving them crazy.” Lloyd Levin sees it differently. “From a creative point of view, Simon totally turned it around.”

West worked with Massett and Zinman on yet another draft, delivered in March 2000, keeping the theme of immortality from the ‘Shield of Achilles’ drafts, but replacing it with West’s idea: a search for an artefact called ‘The Triangle of Light’ by the ‘Illuminati’ — a secret order described in the Illuminatus trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson (for whom a newly-introduced character, Wilson, is presumably named). Said Zinman, “When we met with Simon his idea was the sacred shape, and there’s only one sacred shape and that’s the triangle. The trinity, the number three, the pyramids, the Masons, Christianity, the ‘all-seeing eye’ — it’s just naturally there... We wrote in prose form what the mythology was, who the ‘people of the light’ were, what the pieces [of the triangle] were. I’ve got to tip my hat to Simon West,” he added. “He said, ‘Let’s take it out of the known. Let’s make it more mystical and unknown.’ I think it was a wise choice.”

Despite all these revisions, de Souza says that the script’s basic shape and flavour remained close to his original: “We were still chasing after something Alexander had hidden, and Lara had a love/hate trust/don’t trust relationship with a guy she was travelling with in partnership.” West renamed all the supporting characters, including two held over from the de Souza draft — the cybernetic trainer, JEEVES, and the male lead, Kincaid — which he changed to ‘SIMON’ and ‘West’ respectively. “I thought it revealing that he put the name ‘Simon’ on the robot, which is a mindless drone, and ‘West’ on the character who vacillates,” says de Souza wryly, “because the film demonstrated completely mechanical storytelling, combined with a lot of indecision about which way to go.”

As rewriting continued, so did the search for someone to fill Lara’s boots. Despite earlier negotiations with Angelina Jolie, an edition of Entertainment Weekly dated 2 March 2000 quoted Simon West as saying that he was looking for an unknown actress to play what he described as the “James Bond of archaeology”, for a June start date. “To some, she’s the perfect woman, though others would say she’s a total male fabrication of what a woman should be,” he added. “We don’t want to ram a Hollywood star into this thing, because Lara is visually [known].”

West did not reveal how he planned to raise the money for a globe-trotting action movie with expensive set pieces, however, and the following day, Variety reported that Jolie — who was just two weeks away from winning an Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted — was in “final negotations” to play Lara Croft. Tomb Raider fans were divided on Jolie’s casting: some celebrated the idea of an actress as intrinsically sexy and cool as Jolie playing Lara; others were concerned that her off-screen activities — she sported numerous tattoos (including a large one bearing her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s name), and had admitted a proclivity for self-harm and knife wounds inflicted during sex — did not sit well with a game enjoyed by millions of pre-adolescent boys.[2]

“It was always Angelina,” West later admitted to Empire. “I mean, Lara sleeps with knives and doesn’t take shit from anybody. That’s A. J. down to a tee.” Nevertheless, it took some time for West to convince Jolie that the role fit her like a tank top and a pair of hot pants. “At first I thought Tomb Raider was a really bad idea,” she told Empire. “Like most people I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be silly and campy, and only based on that little outfit and the body.’ But then Simon and I talked about her, about her relationship with her father, and she became kind of beautiful to me.”

Certainly, one element of the Tomb Raider deal which may have helped swing the newly-minted Academy Award-winner into the film was the opportunity to work with her father, fellow Oscar-winner Jon Voight, from whom she had been estranged for many years. “It’s taken us a long time to figure out if we could do a project together, for many different reasons,” she said, “and it’s very special. It’s also very scary, because our relationship is very, very similar to these two people, [in that] through my whole life, I’ve followed in his footsteps. And he’s somebody who searches the world for information, different religions, different places, different myths.”

West went a step further than casting Voight as Lara’s explorer father, as de Souza explains: “One of the things that gave him leverage was she wanted to work with her father, so he said, ‘I’ll put your father in the movie, and I’ll let you write your own scenes with your father.’ So she and her father wrote those scenes they were in together. It shows how stupid everybody is because nowhere in the source material does it say the father’s dead,” he adds. “So if they want the father in the movie, let him be alive in the movie. They could have had a scene like in The Mask of Zorro, where the father dies in the daughter’s arms. Instead, they get the father in the movie the hardest way possible, with all these dream sequences and flashbacks.”

Despite de Souza’s reservations, regular Ain’t It Cool script reviewer ‘Moriarty’ was impressed by the shooting draft, not least the thematic resonance Massett and Zinman had been aiming for. “This script is first and foremost about Lara coming to some sense of peace with the loss of her father,” wrote Moriarty. “This entire adventure serves only to take Lara to the next step, to get her over this particular pain. Loss informs her every choice in the movie, and it’s one of the things that elevates the material, that gives it some heft and resonance.” As Massett explained, “It was always our intention for Lara to have a connection to the past, to the present, and to how those worlds collided and what that meant. The Triangle of Light held the theme to understand God, or man’s duty to understand the nature of Nature itself. That was the theme that came through.” Moriarty also approved of the script’s “nimble wit”, which included a sight gag where Lara, considering the options for her next mission, opens a file containing pictures of Egypt: “Right away, she tosses it aside, a welcome sight for anyone who’s seen the Indy films and the new Mummy.” As for the supporting characters, he thought the Q-like Bryce was an interesting foil for the heroine, noted the effective “sexual energy” between Lara and Alex Marrs, and highlighted her “antagonistic sparring” with the Illuminati villain Manfred Powell.

“I was surprised by how much I invested in Lara and her father by the end of the film,” he added. “There’s difficult choices that she makes that mark her as a hero of real conscience and strength, rather than just a babe in shorts who’s good at killing thugs. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some talky chick flick by any stretch of the imagination. There’s several great action set pieces... [and] each of them defines Lara or her relationships with Bryce, Powell, Marrs, and even her father. None of them are just action for the sake of it, and that’s what intrigues me most about this film... These set pieces are all built on clever ideas, smart in both text and subtext. Lara’s got a touch of angst in the film, as befits a story driven by the memory of her dead father, but she also loves what she does. She’s not Batman... She seems to attack situations with two hands, digging in, drunk on raw experience. Jolie’s got the exact right edge to play the role as written. There’s something in Lara that seems almost out of control, and that makes her dangerous, and that makes her even more interesting.”

Moriarty also admitted to being “unexpectedly moved” by the finale, in which the heroes and villains vie for The Power of God in The Tomb of Ten Thousand Shadows. “The choices faced in this scene make the whole film pay off... There’s a reason they didn’t just pour a pair of tits into the lead role of this film. Jolie’s got to go through some pretty harrowing beats to get to her final destination... The Lara Croft that comes out the other side is both tougher than she’s ever been, and finally able to embrace some sort of life away from danger and death.”

This shooting draft — credited to Massett, Zinman, Laeta Kalogridis and West himself — was dated 28 July 2000, just three days before production officially commenced at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, before setting off for such diverse locations as Cambodia and Iceland. “Originally, I wrote the idea to be in China, and I was going to use the Terracotta Army as an opposing force,” West commented later. “But it was not possible to organise getting to China in time. And also, when I thought about it, I realised that the Great Wall would only give me one big element, and I needed so much more for that sequence. So I started looking around to other places, because the alternative was to build the Great Wall in Scotland, and the prospect of shooting in Scotland in winter didn’t appeal to me that much, and I didn’t think it was going to look that warm and ‘Chinese-y!’ So I looked around the world for other great settings and I happened to come across Cambodia.”

As filming continued, numerous cuts made to the budget and schedule meant that there would be fewer pieces to the plot puzzle. As Zinman explained, “We wrote a script that was just huge, and it needed to be scaled back. They had to omit a few costly scenes.” Thus, he added, “In the shooting draft it’s only two pieces of the triangle, [which is] symbolically less satisfying, because it’s only two, not three. But of course, we only have 120 minutes and only have however many millions of dollars.” Further cuts were made for budgetary reasons, including what would appear to be a crucial flashback in which Lord Croft (Jon Voight) explains the mythology, mysticism and might of the ‘Triangle of Light’ to seven year-old Lara, illustrated by cutaways of the action he narrates.

“Long, long ago, a meteor crashed to Earth,” he explains. “An ancient people excavated the meteor, and found, buried at its core, a mysterious, crystallised metal. They worshipped the metal for its magical powers, forging it into a sacred shape — a perfect triangle. They engraved upon it an emblem of its great power,” he goes on, referring to the ‘all-seeing eye’. “The mysterious Triangle induced great insights in its guardians, great knowledge in mathematics and science. They called themselves ‘The People of the Light’. But others heard of the power of the Triangle and wanted it for themselves. A great war raged, and finally their beautiful Spiral City suffered under a terrible siege. As fire engulfed their homes, the sun appeared to go out. It was a total eclipse. Believing the end of the world to be upon them, their High Priest prayed desperately to the heavens — ‘Let my enemies be vanquished.’ And with the words still on his lips, his prayers were answered in a horrific instant!

“The High Priest knew that this power should not be held by any man,” he continues. “A power that could explode the human mind. The power of God. He ordered the Triangle cut into two smaller, right-angled triangles. One half was to stay at the Temple, while the other half was to be hidden at the end of the earth to prevent the Triangle’s strange power from being used to change the fate of Humankind. In defiance of the High Priest, the craftsmen who had cut the Triangle in half secretly made a highly advanced clock to serve as a guide to find the hidden piece, and preserve the Triangle’s awesome powers for future generations of their kind. They called themselves ‘The Illuminati’. They all realised that the exact alignment of the planets necessary to activate the Triangle would not be due for another 5,000 years. But eventually, after many centuries, the People of the Light, the craftsmen, and their incredible Spiral City, and of course, their secret clock, disappeared, evaporating from the pages of history.”

With this sequence cut, says de Souza, the search for the Triangle becomes meaningless, since “it was never clear what it could do. It just said [it had] ‘the power of a God’, or ‘power over time and space’, but what does that mean, really? Stephen Hawking has that, and he doesn’t even get out of his wheelchair!” De Souza also felt that the villains were “campy and arch,” likening the tone to the ill-fated big-screen adaptation of classic 1960s television caper The Avengers. In addition, he says, “When I was on the picture they were saying, ‘We want to get out of England by the end of the first act; we’ve got to be out of England by page thirty.’ So I said ‘OK.’ And this one here it’s barely ninety minutes long, but I think it really is like forty minutes before she leaves her house.” Only three elements of de Souza’s script survived to the shooting script: Lara’s fight against her household cybernetic opponent, her acrobatic gun battle with the invaders of Croft Hall, and the Ray Harryhausen homage in which the statues coming to life. This was not deemed sufficient for the Writers Guild of America to award de Souza a screen credit; instead, Werb, Colleary and Sara B. Cooper share story credit, with Massett, Zinman and West himself receiving credit for the screenplay. Screenwriters commonly fight for credit on a film, often claiming the best ideas as their own; in this case, de Souza says, “all the writers, who maybe under normal circumstances would say, ‘That son of a bitch rewrote me and changed me,’ were united in their dismay of this script, that had not been written so much as unwritten.”

As if the development had not been hellish enough, problems plagued the production, with the Sunday Express breaking the news on 8 October 2000 that raw footage from the film had been stolen during a daring raid worthy of Lara herself. “Burglars escaped with a rucksack containing sensitive video tapes and a wallet during a burglary at the home of director Simon West,” the tabloid reported, quoting West as saying he was woken by an intruder breaking the front door of his £1.1 million three-bedroomed home in Notting Hill, London. “I was in bed at home when I heard a huge crash downstairs at about 2am,” he said. “I got up and went down but they just ran out. I didn’t see them — just the front door swinging. I must have missed them by a split second. They snatched my bag, which had two or three tapes including all the film so far — literally about half the film. It was everything we’ve done in the last two months.” Two months later, the film made headlines again when Angelina Jolie injured her ankle on location, causing a week’s delay, and adding $1 million to the already bloated budget, now edging towards $100 million.

Worse was to come, as one of West’s assistants filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the director, and Bobby Klein, reportedly a former “psychologist specialising in stress management” who acts as West’s manager (and received a screen credit as co-producer of the Tomb Raider film). Klein had hired Dana Robinson, a twenty-five year-old agent’s assistant for Creative Artists Agency, but after quitting her job and relocating to London to work on the production, she became uncomfortable with Klein’s sexual advances and other inappropriate behaviour. In a twenty-three-page complaint filed by her lawyers against Klein, West and Paramount, Robinson claimed emotional distress, sexual harassment and wrongful dismissal, since — she alleged — her complaints led to her being given the sack. Attorneys representing Paramount and West counter-claimed that she was dismissed after three months for poor work performance, while West has said that lawsuits like this come with the territory. “I’ve learned that when you get into this position in the entertainment industry, you get targeted,” he told Premiere. “It’s just one of those unfortunate things that when people don’t work out, they look for someone to blame.” Nevertheless, says de Souza, “I do not think there is parking space on the Paramount lot for Simon West.”

In addition to such problems, de Souza alleges that West went “many, many millions over budget and two months over schedule, so the minute he turned in his interminable 130-minute cut, Paramount showed him the door. They didn’t even let him in the editing room.” Whether or not this is true — West was later invited back to direct minor reshoots in London, and provides director’s commentary for the DVD — Paramount brought in Stuart Baird, a veteran trouble-shooting editor with credits as diverse as Superman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mission: Impossible 2, to re-cut the entire movie. “Stuart Baird has an executive producer credit on the movie,” notes de Souza, “but all he did was re-cut the movie down to eighty-eight minutes (plus generous head and tail credits).” The studio also rejected the original music score by Michael Kamen (The X-Men), commissioning Pitch Black composer Graeme Revell to produce a new soundtrack — sixty minutes of music — in the space of ten days. “The only way I could write so much music in ten days was to weight the approach in favour of electronics rather than orchestra,” Revell told Dreamwatch magazine. “But this was as much a creative decision as anything because the style of the film does not support a big bombastic orchestral score.” So rushed were the final stages of post-production, that several major effects shots appeared incomplete by the time the film hit theatres. Finally, says de Souza, “They released it and crossed their fingers.”

Despite problems which stretched from development to post-production and a widespread critical drubbing, the film — now entitled Lara Croft Tomb Raider — opened on 15 June 2001 with a colossal $47.7 million opening weekend, and went on to gross over $130 million in the US alone, and a total of $275 million worldwide. By the time the first weekend’s box office tallies were in, a sequel was already in the works, but although Angelina Jolie was asked to fulfill her contract for a sequel — with a $5 million pay increase — director Simon West was not invited back. “I guess at some point somebody said, ‘We’re not going to go through that shit again,’” suggests de Souza. “‘The director this time is not going to be someone who thinks he’s a writer.’”

Instead, producers Gordon and Levin hired cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont, whose directing career had derailed after early successes like Speed and Twister, with Speed 2: Cruise Control and The Haunting both proving to be box office disappointments. James V. Hart (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hook) and hot newcomer Dean Georgaris (Paycheck, Mission: Impossible III) were among those hired to work on the script, which concerned a desperate search for Pandora’s Box, the mythical source of all the pain in the world. “The first one did not have a strong story, I’ll be the first to admit it,” producer Lloyd Levin later told Entertainment Weekly. “We should have made a better movie. But we learned from our mistakes and this new one is a better movie. For starters, it’s got a plot.”

Like West, de Souza did not expect to have anything to do with the Tomb Raider sequel, until he happened to see publicity stills featuring Angelina Jolie in the underwater temple of Alexander the Great. After doing some digging of his own, de Souza discovered that Lara was being partnered with a British agent — just as she had been in his drafts for the first Tomb Raider film. “That’s when I called the Writers Guild and said, ‘Listen, this may sound wacky, but when the Tomb Raider II script comes in for credit determination, could you check it against my “officially discarded” March 1999 script of Tomb Raider I?’” Sure enough, he says, “the Guild reader said, ‘Hold on a second — the source of this script is obviously the de Souza script, resurrected.’ At that point, the studio said, ‘That’s impossible! This script was a cold start, a totally brilliant fresh new approach of sheer geniusity that just happens to have been written by our producer.’” This was a shock, de Souza says, “because I’ve known Lloyd Levin for a dozen years, and he’s never written anything except a memo.”[3]

De Souza can only guess what happened. “After the movie opened, on the following Monday, they probably said, ‘We want to have a sequel out in two years,’ which is impossible. Then somebody went to the filing cabinet, found the script I wrote, which had been in pre-production with sets designed, and said, ‘No it’s not — we’ve got a schedule, boards, budgets, breakdowns and production design for the de Souza draft!’ So they resurrected my script, which gave them a head start. It shows how crazy it can get.” Nevertheless, he adds, “It actually showed some kind of efficiency for a change, that somebody had the sense to remember they already had a script they liked from before... returning to the script (and budget, board, location work, prop purchases, etc) all still lying around from only ten months earlier. So they already had the comp’d Scuba gear and underwater sleds, the design for Alexander the Great’s library set, Hogan’s alley, etc.” What was more surprising for de Souza was that he had to find out by accident. “You’d think Larry Gordon would have called me to tell me this,” he says. “I’d worked with him many times. But no — I had to find it out from the Internet.”

Although Levin and Hart have privately stated that de Souza had nothing to do with the script for the sequel (technically true), the WGA agreed to award de Souza a shared story credit with Hart, with Dean Georgaris receiving sole screenplay credit. “The sequel, with every line of dialogue changed, does essentially follow my script for about twenty minutes,” says de Souza. “Then when the MI6 men come to her house, she wasn’t a bitch on wheels for no discernable reason, but she was thrown by the presence of the younger government guy. [In my draft,] he was the male lead of the picture, and his moment where he betrayed Lara and Queen and Country was in the movie, mind-fucking the audience, instead of in the movie’s back-story. Also, they didn’t know what Alexander had hidden, but they knew the other heavies were killing their way towards it.” Says de Souza, “The Guild said... Tomb Raider II’s genesis from my 1999 script was ‘irrefutable’ — the actual word used in the Guild paperwork — at which point the studio was bound by the sixty-five year-old contract that says, ‘Guild determines credit, period.’ And that’s how I worked on Tomb Raider for six months, but got a screen credit for no months on Tomb Raider II!”

Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life finally opened on 24 July 2003 with a disappointing first-weekend take of $21.8 million — less than half that of the original — and an overall worldwide gross of $156 million. Critics were slightly kinder than they had been the first time around, but it was obvious that the paying public weren’t impressed. Paramount was swift to try and place the blame for the film’s failure elsewhere. “The only thing that we can attribute it to is that gamers were not happy with the latest version of the videogame,” ventured the studio’s Wayne Lewellen, referring to the critically derided PlayStation 2 game Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, which had failed to repeat the success of earlier incarnations. Entertainment Weekly had a different opinion: “If Paramount had spent a few bucks on polling, it might have discovered that despite its $131 million gross, nobody who went to the first Tomb Raider walked out saying, ‘Can’t wait for part two!’”

The Tomb Raider property suffered mixed fortunes in the wake of the twin debacles of the Angel of Darkness console game and Cradle of Life movie. In 2006, Crystal Dynamics superseded Core Design as overseers of the game’s future development, inviting one of the original creators, Toby Gard, to work on a Tomb Raider reboot, which would take Lara Croft back to her tomb-raiding roots. The resulting game, Tomb Raider: Legend, was a bestselling title on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, and a remake of the original game — Tomb Raider: Anniversary — was developed and released in 2007, followed by Tomb Raider: Underworld a year later, all proving moderately successful. On 18 August 2010, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix released a download-only title, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the first game not to feature the words ‘Tomb Raider’ in the title. That nomenclature was being held back for a ground-breaking reboot of the franchise, scheduled for late 2012.

Similar plans were being drawn up to revive the film franchise, with British producer Graham King’s GK Films, the company behind Rango, The Town and Angelina Jolie topliner The Tourist, acquiring the motion picture rights, and announcing Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — who wrote Jon Favreau’s smash hit Iron Man and the less successful Cowboys & Aliens — as screenwriters. “Mark and Hawk’s sensibilities of action and emotion are perfect for the direction we are taking this franchise,” King said in a press statement in early 2011, the 15th anniversary of the first Tomb Raider game. Ignoring the previous films, the new Tomb Raider story would be a fashionable ‘reboot’, returning to Lara Croft’s roots and re-telling her backstory for a new era. As the screenwriters commented, “We aim to write an origin story for Lara Croft that solidifies her place alongside Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor in the pantheon of great female action heroes.” Whether the new Tomb Raider can repeat the success of the Aliens and Terminator franchises remains to be seen.

_____________

1 Now commonly known as the PlayStation One.

2 Fans may have been even more doubtful if they knew that Jolie wanted Lara to have a Mohawk hairstyle instead of Lara’s plaited pony-tail.

3 Even if Levin did contribute to the screenplay, as he claims, the WGA makes it even more difficult for producers to achieve writing credits than directors, for obvious reasons.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FILM

How James Cameron, Roland Emmerich and others encountered huge problems trying to remake ’60s sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage

“Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage — it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over and I hated it.”

— Roland Emmerich on James Cameron’s version of Fantastic Voyage

In 1965, an episode of the popular television series I Dream of Jeannie had an intriguing plot, in which Major Nelson (Larry Hagman) acts as a technical consultant for a movie in which an American astronaut is miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a Russian cosmonaut, in an effort to retrieve information from his brain.

Less than a year later, on 24 August 1966, a movie with a startlingly similar premise appeared in US cinemas. “This film will take you where no one has ever been before,” declared a title card that preceded the film.[1] “No eye witness has ever seen what you are about to see. But in this world of ours, where going to the moon will soon be upon us, where the most incredible things are happening all around us, some day — perhaps tomorrow — the fantastic events you are about to see can and will take place.” Entitled Fantastic Voyage, the film starred Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch as members of an experimental expedition injected into the body of an American scientist, Jan Benes, in a miniaturized submarine known as Proteus. Their mission: to dislodge a life-threatening blood clot that Benes sustained during a failed assassination attempt by an enemy spy. Voyaging through the bloodstream, the crew of the Proteus encounters numerous hazards, including an ‘arteriovenous fistula’, an attack by antibodies and white blood cells, an oxygen shortage — even deliberate sabotage by one of the crew.

Directed by Richard Fleischer, best known for Disney’s lavish live-action sci-fi adventure 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage was scripted by Harry Kleiner (later of Bullitt fame) and David Duncan (The Time Machine) from a story by British writer Otto Klement and sci-fi buff Jerome Bixby (aka Jay Lewis Bixby), who wrote the ‘It’s A Good Life’ episode of The Twilight Zone and several notable Star Trek stories, including ‘Mirror, Mirror.’ Although the $6.5 million film — at the time, the most expensive science fiction film ever produced — was hardly a financial success,[2]Fantastic Voyage was critically lauded for its cutting-edge special effects, colourful production design and imaginative staging by Irwin Allen alumnus Jack Martin Smith, Dale Hennessy and Harper Goff. Critics and audiences alike (mostly) forgave the hefty suspension of disbelief required to get around the spurious science and logical flaws. It was the first and last time a film featuring Raquel Welch would win three Oscars.

Many believed the film was adapted from a novel by legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, whose story Fantastic Voyage had been published in serial form in The Saturday Evening Post, and later as a novel, several months before the movie debuted in cinemas. In fact, a year earlier, Asimov had been paid five thousand dollars to write a novelization of the film’s script, initially turning down the proposal because of the story’s logic problems, mostly concerning the miniaturization of certain particles of matter. Asimov relented when told he would be allowed to modify the narrative, and make game attempts to address the more obvious examples of bad science. “I followed the plot line that existed as closely as I could,” he wrote later, “except for changing several of the more insupportable scientific inconsistencies.” Nevertheless, he added, “I was never quite satisfied with the novel, simply because I never felt it to be entirely mine.”

In 1984, by which time the novel had sold a colossal two million copies, Asimov was approached to write a belated sequel to Fantastic Voyage. Doubleday sent him an outline, which, he later recalled, “involved two vessels in the bloodstream, one American and one Soviet, and what followed was a kind of sub-microscopic version of World War III.” Asimov disliked the story and rejected the offer, leading the publisher to approach another science fiction writer, Philip José Farmer, who, according to Asimov, “wrote a novel and sent in the manuscript... It dealt with World War III in the bloodstream, and it was full of action and excitement.” Although Asimov urged Doubleday to accept Farmer’s manuscript, the publisher refused, encouraging him to write a completely new book based on his own ideas. Eventually, Asimov agreed, “on the condition that I do it entirely my own way,” and Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain was published in 1987. Despite the title, it was not a sequel, but a re-imagining of the original story, in which a team of American and Soviet scientists, working together, are miniaturized and injected into the comatose body of a Soviet counterpart, hoping to unlock the key to the greatest scientific advance in history. “A motion picture may be made from it,” Asimov wrote in the book’s introduction, “but if so, this novel will owe nothing at all to it. For better or for worse, this novel is mine.”

Although no movie was forthcoming, 1987 also saw the cinema release of Joe Dante’s good-natured Fantastic Voyage spoof, Innerspace, starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short and Meg Ryan. It was not until the mid-1990s, when science fiction began to enjoy mainstream success thanks to The X-Files on television and Independence Day in cinemas, that an official Fantastic Voyage remake was considered financially viable. Like every other studio in town, 20th Century Fox executives began searching its archives to find science fiction properties which might capitalise on that success, and soon stumbled upon Fantastic Voyage. It did not take a genius to see the box office potential of a remake using state-of-the-art special effects, nor that the best people to handle the fast-tracked update might be the brains behind either The X-Files or Independence Day — preferably both. Thus, in 1996, the 30th anniversary of the original Fantastic Voyage, Fox hired Independence Day’s director and producer, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin.

“When I was a kid,” says Devlin, “my favourite ride at Disneyland was the Monsanto ride [‘Adventure Into Inner Space’], where you would ‘shrink’, and I loved the ride because I loved Fantastic Voyage. It was one of my favourite movies as a kid. So it was just one of those things where I thought, ‘Man, how cool would it be to get to re-do that?’ And you know what they say, ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood.’”

Emmerich and Devlin were excited to imagine how Fantastic Voyage might look in the age of computer-generated digital effects, the kind that made films like Independence Day possible. “What was fascinating to us was what we could do digitally, at the time, effects-wise,” he says. “There had been a lot of work done digitizing the human body, so there was a lot of existing digital material of the inside of the human body. And we thought, ‘You know what? If we could make that feel real, and give everybody an adventure inside the human body, that would be the greatest adventure.”

Emmerich and Devlin, avowed fans of The X-Files, brought in two of that show’s most popular writers, Glen Morgan and James Wong, to take a first pass at the screenplay. “Dean Devlin asked us, while we were at lunch in the Fox commissary, if we would be interested in writing Fantastic Voyage,” Morgan remembers. “He gave us some of his ideas, which incorporated nanotechnology and the assassination of the President into the plot. He wanted it set in Tokyo, I think. He pitched us his thoughts and his knowledge of nanotechnology, and, as I recall, gave us much freedom to do what we wanted given his guidelines.” Despite his and Wong’s science fiction credentials — in addition to The X-Files, the pair created Space: Above and Beyond — Morgan had never actually seen the original Fantastic Voyage. “As a kid, [even] through high school, I used to faint at the sight of blood — and in classes where we studied the human body,” he explains. “So it was not a movie I ever would watch. I would have been terrified!” Having overcome his squeamishness in later life, Morgan finally got to see Fantastic Voyage, which he describes as “a great idea made at a time when the visual effects were not truly capable of delivering what needed to be done to depict the interior of the human body. Of course,” he adds, “any film with Raquel Welch in that tight white suit and zipper deal is worth watching!”

Opening with a terrifically effective, screen-filling close-up of a human eye, designed to make the audience feel microscopic, Morgan and Wong’s 139-page first draft begins on 14 June 2014 — at the time of writing, seventeen years in the future. It is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, and the world is in crisis once again, as President Greer — who, like many movie Presidents of the 1990s, is presciently African-American — attends an emergency summit in Tokyo, hoping to contain the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, an event which many believe may light the fuse on World War III. “We had this idea that it was like a repeat of the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand,” Devlin says, referring to the inciting incident of the Great War. En route to the summit, the President is shot during a failed assassination attempt by “Japanese extremists,” which leaves him comatose, with a potentially fatal blood clot in his brain. “Any attempt to remove the clot via neurosurgical micro-techniques, or even bipolar laser surgery,” a surgeon tells the First Lady, Jocelyn Greer, “could create lesions, damaging the Hippocampus and impairing long term memory processing.” With the President’s injuries threatening to plunge the world into global conflict, a radical solution is proposed: injecting the President with artificially intelligent ‘nanobots’, programmed to clear the obstacle from the inside. Unfortunately, the operation goes disastrously wrong, leading to an even more radical and experimental response: the injection into the President’s bloodstream of a miniaturized submarine, crewed by a group of Navy SEALs, on a mission to destroy the errant nanobots before performing the delicate surgical procedure themselves.

With the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, and only the President’s recovery able to avert disaster, the Vice-President and First Lady authorize the mission. When an accident grotesquely deforms and kills one of the crew during miniaturization, Secret Service agent Adam Richter — who blames himself for the President’s condition — volunteers in his place. By page fifty-five, the Proteus (which is not miniaturized, having been built at the nano scale) is on its fantastic voyage through President Greer’s bloodstream, on a ‘search and destroy’ mission to the rogue nanobots. Showing the same mastery of military-based action in a science fiction context as their short-lived television show Space: Above and Beyond, Morgan and Wong ramp up the tension and jeopardy, with attacking monocytes, clinging nicotine tar, a potentially fatal power failure, plunging body temperatures and an oxygen shortage — not to mention the deadly, super-intelligent nanobots. All in the surreal, otherworldly setting of the human bloodstream.

Like Asimov, Morgan and Wong did their utmost to explain the scientific thinking behind the miniaturization process. “The molecular construction of a subject is recorded, layer by layer, in a molecular mnemonics system,” Professor Yeo, one of the inventors of the miniaturization technique, explains. “Enzymes, oxidizers and free radical atoms begin breaking chemical bonds. The disassemblers store the subject’s elements. Seventy per cent of the body is water, which is drained from the blood to a minimum level. Chromosomes and certain proteins are not broken down, but are vitrified with cryoprotectants, propylene glycol and dimethyl sulfoxide. The body is then, in essence, redesigned and reconstructed to a nanotomical scale based on its original anatomical ‘blueprint.’” While the excess elements are stored in liquid nitrogen, the biostasis procedure is monitored by robotic engineers. “At the completion of the mission, these very elements are again used by the ‘Universal Assembler’ with the guidance of the molecular mnemonics system to reconstruct the subject, nearly exactly, at the macroscale.” Heck, it sounded convincing.

“At the end of the day,” says Devlin, “what everybody struggles with is people that small being inside the human body. How do you do that without it turning silly? And we never quite bought that part of it. It’s like, that was the one big leap we had to keep on making, and somehow we were never able to convince the studio or anyone else that that leap was credible.” Given the leaps of logic required to make stories like Stargate and Independence Day credible, Emmerich and Devlin had no qualms about exercising artistic license in pursuit of entertainment. “Our rule had always been, if you only ask the audience to do one major leap, you could get away with it. And that’s what our belief was in Fantastic Voyage: we know that’s going to be the one thing you’re gonna have to bite your tongue on, but if everything else feels completely solid, maybe they’ll go with us on it.” Devlin says that, in many cases, it’s a matter of tone. “Roland and I have always felt that what we got away with on Independence Day was down to one little line of dialogue: at the beginning of the third act, Jeff Golblum gives this gigantic speech about how they’re going to fly into the mothership and put in the virus, and they’re gonna launch a bomb... this ridiculous speech. At the end of it, Will Smith says, ‘I’ll fly it up there in that spaceship,’ and Jeff Goldblum says, ‘You really think you can fly that thing?’ And Will Smith says, ‘You really think you can do all that bullshit you just said?’ And it’s just kind of like we turn to the audience and say, ‘All right, we’re having fun here — don’t crawl up your own asses! Just sit back and have fun with us!’”

Sadly, by the time Morgan and Wong delivered their script, on 12 June 1997, the film’s would-be producer and director team, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, had left Fox to make Godzilla for Sony. “They had some sort of sudden falling out with Fox, or something,” says Morgan. Neither he nor Wong were privy to the details of the pair’s hasty exit from the studio whose coffers they had recently enriched by over $800 million — not including merchandise, home video and other ancillary markets. “Jim and I were very low on the totem pole of that project,” he adds, “and what really happened between Fox and Dean and Roland was not any of my business.”

“What happened was that when we left Fox, we made a trade. We said we would give up any of our rights on Fantastic Voyage if they would give us Supertanker,” Devlin explains, referring to Emmerich and Devlin’s planned disaster movie, which was sunk by the events of 9/11.

Fantastic Voyage was now adrift, with neither producer nor director shepherding the project towards pre-production. It was at this point that Fox’s executive vice-president of production, Peter Rice, stepped in. “Jim and I got called into his office and questioned about the Fantastic Voyage script,” says Morgan, “and asked if we were interested in doing some notes, but we never heard from Fox again.” With Morgan and Wong moving on (to launch, in 2000, the successful Final Destination franchise), Rice wasted no time drafting in a new screenwriter: Tab Murphy, who had written an imaginative underwater sci-fi yarn for Disney, Atlantis: The Lost Continent, and the unproduced disaster movie, Supertanker, for Emmerich and Devlin. Although it retained the backbone of the plot — the microscopic crew of a miniaturized submarine enter the President’s bloodstream in order to save the President, and by extension the world — Murphy’s version differed from Morgan and Wong’s in a number of ways. As the story begins, the miniaturization process — achieved by mapping the subject’s genetic code, disassembling it atom by atom, then reassembling it on a subatomic level — is still at the testing stage, leading to an horrific accident with a chimpanzee which, like the baboon in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, fails to properly reassemble. As before, the reuinification of China and Taiwan is about to take place, and an historic treaty is about to be signed which, it is hoped, will avert a potential global conflict.

This time, however, the President (in Murphy’s version, a kindly old white guy) is shot by a Taiwanese nationalist — with an experimental bullet which hatches five nanobots, “horrifying metallic micromachines of destruction, their nicknames aptly [describing] their vicious physical appearances: ‘JAWS’, ‘BUZZSAW’, ‘SHREDDER’, ‘SCORPION’ and ‘SPIDER’!”

A team of twelve assorted scientists, nanotechnology experts and Navy SEALs are assembled (and then disassembled and re-assembled), one of whom doesn’t survive the miniaturization process. By page 46, the crew of the Proteus, including Morgan and Wong’s Agent Richter, has been injected into the President’s bloodstream, on a mission to take out the nanobots by destroying their micro-electronic silicon chip ‘brains’ with miniaturized explosives. Interpersonal tensions and frayed tempers are set aside when the crew faces its first challenge – a vicious attack by the nanobots which wipes out the Navy SEALs, leaving only Agent Richter and the scientists to face the mechanized menace with brains, rather than brawn.

“My draft was well received,” says Murphy, “but Peter felt the ‘assembled team of experts’ approach was a little too close to Armageddon, which Disney had released that year. I then embarked on a set of revisions. I remember it took me quite a while to make the revisions, mainly because I was doing a draft on another project for Devlin/Emmerich at the same time. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with the project dying on the vine, but I recall Peter not being too happy with my tardiness.” In any case, he adds, “Unbeknownst to me, the project was apparently dead even before I turned in my revised draft.”

Fantastic Voyage was not adrift again for long. In 1998, it was linked for the first time with James Cameron, the hugely successful writer-director of Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and True Lies, who had recently gifted Paramount and Fox the biggest movie of all time, Titanic. Cameron was twelve years old when the original Fantastic Voyage was released, and the film no doubt had a place in the young sci-fi fan’s heart. Murphy recalls meeting with Cameron’s regular collaborator, producer Jon Landau, to discuss Fantastic Voyage. “He had read my revised draft, and liked it,” Murphy says, “but felt it was too reverent to the original film.” At the time, he says, Fox was keen to get Cameron on board, either to direct or produce.

In the meantime, a company calling itself Fantastic Voyage Associates, who claimed ownership of the title and concept behind the movie, contacted science fiction writer Kevin J Anderson, best known for a series of authorised X-Files, Star Wars and Dune novels, to propose him as author of a new Fantastic Voyage novel. “I remembered the film and the Saturday morning cartoon of Team Proteus involved in numerous microscopic adventures,” he says, referring to the 17 episode Filmation series which ran on ABC-TV from September 1968 to January 1969. “The basic idea had so much potential! How could I not want to be turned loose in that milieu?” Anderson was given no specific direction, “except to create my own story and not connect it directly with the film or characters,” but watched the film and read both of Isaac Asimov’s novels before tackling his own story. “In my novel, Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm, the Proteus team goes where no one has gone before: they explore one of the alien bodies from a crashed UFO, which comes complete with nanotechnology protective mechanisms.” As Anderson toiled on the novel during the year 2000, he recalls reading scattered reports of a possible remake, “but nothing ever came of it. Microcosm, on the other hand, was published on schedule. Another example of the difference between publishing and filmmaking.”

Indeed, little was heard of the Fantastic Voyage film project under Cameron’s stewardship, as the director spent much of the decade after Titanic planning and then making his next box office record-breaker, Avatar. Then, in September 2007, Roland Emmerich revealed to Empire magazine the fate that seemed to have befallen Cameron’s version. “I was attached to this project fifteen years ago with Dean Devlin,” Emmerich explained, “and then we gave it back because we wanted to do some other original projects we had developed.” At this point, Cameron came aboard, and in 2005 invited Emmerich to consider directing the project. “Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage — it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over and I hated it.”

Chief among Emmerich’s gripes was the screenplay’s futuristic setting. “I said, ‘Why have you put this in the future? Let this happen now — it’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, ‘Well, we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body.” Despite the Navy SEALs present in the Morgan and Wong draft created under his earlier attachment to the project, Emmerich also disliked the militaristic aspects of Cameron’s approach, calling to mind Michael Biehn’s rogue Navy SEAL in Cameron’s The Abyss. “There were two submarines in the body,” Emmerich explained. “It was like a Navy SEALs film. And then the president of production at Fox — me and my partner and him all go surfing together — says, ‘Well, will you do it with a page one rewrite and we won’t start until you’re happy with the script?’ So then I said yes. The key,” the director of The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 added, “is I won’t do it unless it’s going to be a good movie.”

A writer’s strike delayed work on the next script, written by National Treasure: Book of Secrets co-writers Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, and by the time it was completed, Emmerich was busy directing 2012. James Cameron, on the other hand, had finished making his game-changing 3D blockbuster Avatar, and was potentially available once again to oversee Fantastic Voyage. “We’ve been working on a script for Fantastic Voyage for a few [years],” Cameron admitted at a press conference for Avatar in December 2009, “but that’s not for me to direct. That’s just to produce. It’s quite different,” he added, “but it’s got enough of the original story that you still recognise it.” A year after Avatar’s record-breaking release, Cameron executive produced the underwater thriller Sanctum, partly as a way to test cameras which could potentially be used not only on Avatar sequels — but also Fantastic Voyage, which would now almost certainly be filmed in 3D. By this time, a new Fantastic Voyage script was being worked on by screenwriter Shane Salerno, whose sci-fi spin on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Doomsday Protocol, had sold to Fox a year earlier, and whose 1998 smash hit Armageddon could be a seen as a blueprint for a sci-fi blockbuster with an implausible mission at its core.

Then, in March 2010, Variety reported that British director Paul Greengrass was in talks to board the project as director, marking not only his first venture into science fiction, but also his first in 3D. Given that his recently released Iraq War film, Green Zone, had failed to repeat the success of his twin entries in the Bourne franchise, Greengrass may have figured that hitching himself to a would-be event movie such as Fantastic Voyage was a good way to keep himself on the A-list. For whatever reason, no deal was ever reached with Greengrass, who moved on to an update of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Then, in September 2011, Shawn Levy was announced as the latest director of the Fantastic Voyage remake. Levy had directed three hits for 20th Century Fox, including Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum and Date Night, before cutting his sci-fi teeth on the futuristic actioner Real Steel for DreamWorks, and the studio evidently considered him a safe pair of hands for a large-scale blockbuster which wouldn’t break the bank.

“I haven’t read any of the latest incarnations,” says Tab Murphy, “but I’m sure they started from scratch and adhered to Cameron’s ‘vision’ of the movie.” Says Morgan, “I do recall being shocked that it could all go south so fast and they would pay us all that money without ever really reading or dealing with the script.”

“There’s always such a fine line between what gets made and what ends up in development hell,” adds Murphy. “In the past, I would always blame myself for not delivering a script that was ‘good enough’, but I now realise that many ‘good’ scripts never see the light of day for a variety of reasons, the least of which, at times, is the result of a weak script, because many weak scripts end up getting made. It’s enough to drive a screenwriter batty. The main thing is, I’ve stopped beating myself up about it.” James Wong, for his part, doesn’t look back. “It’s weird,” he told Sarah Kendzior. “It’s like you love these things so much, and then you realise they’re gone. And to pick them up again, it’s just a lot of heartache. You just kind of like to remember what it was, I guess. It’s like, never look into a casket at a funeral. Just remember them the way they were.”

_____________

1 The card was changed in later years, once the novelty of the moon landings had worn off.

2
Fantastic Voyage earned $4.5 million in print rentals, from a production budget of $6.5 million, a poor return on investment.

TALES FROM THE SCRIPT

From The Exorcist: The Beginning to Airborne: my own journeys into the Stygian darkness of Development Hell

Like most screenwriters, over the years I’ve had my share of nearly-weres and also-rans. I had Robert Downey Jr. attached to one script, and Matthew McConaughey attached to another — attachments, it turned out, with all the adhesive properties of tap water. One of my scripts was so close to a green light, I was being emailed pictures of the location where shooting would begin within a few weeks; another project had such built-in brand awareness — T.J. Hooker: The Movie — it was assumed, like a giant corporation on the verge of bankruptcy, to be ‘too big to fail.’ Just like Titanic. (The ship, not the movie.) Of the ten feature screenplays I’ve written or co-written, either under commission or ‘on spec’, I’ve had precisely none produced, despite the comings and goings, not to mention promises and assurances, of numerous producers and directors. Within a year of publication of my first exploration of the excruciating tortures of Development Hell, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, I too had been sentenced to the infernal place.

Although I had begun writing for the just-launched Empire magazine in 1989 — my first film review being published in the second issue — I officially entered the film industry in a professional capacity in 1990, when I joined what was then the UK’s biggest film marketing agency, The Creative Partnership, as a copywriter. Although this led to numerous occasions where I was writing material for film luminaries such as Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Leslie Nielsen, John Cleese, Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell, it was largely my parallel pursuit as a film journalist — writing for everyone from The Guardian to Fangoria — which led to my subsequent creative collaborations with filmmakers.

One example of this was when Darren Aronofsky, attending the Deauville festival of American film with his first feature, π, asked if I could recommend a Japanese anime which would be ripe for a live action makeover. I immediately suggested Satoshi Kon’s psychological thriller Perfect Blue, in which a teenage pop star, attempting to shake her squeaky-clean image by starring in a gory horror movie, finds herself stalked by a deranged fan determined to kill those responsible for her career’s change of direction. With the help of an anime-expert friend, I acquired a fan-subtitled copy of the film, transferred it to NTSC, and posted it to Aronofksy in New York. His response was as enthusiastic as it was instantaneous, and he immediately began making overtures to secure the remake rights, promising me an executive producer credit for my trouble. Although Aronofsky managed to secure the rights, the remake did not materialise — although he did borrow one shot from it (an overhead image of a young woman in a bath) for his next film, Requiem for a Dream.[1]

Although I had dabbled in scriptwriting since the early ’90s — without, as is customary for neophytes, actually finishing anything — my screenwriting career began around the turn of the new millennium, when I was inspired to write something ‘on spec’ (i.e., without anyone actually asking, much less paying). The script was for a putative pilot for an equally hypothetical television spin-off from British director Rupert Wainwright’s moderately successful horror film Stigmata (2000), in which a priest (Gabriel Byrne) in the employ of the Vatican investigates a young woman (Patricia Arquette) who appears to be possessed.

I had taught myself the craft of scriptwriting not by attending classes, or burying myself in well-meaning ‘how to’ books, but by reading scripts: approximately half way through the published collection Three Screenplays by Richard Price — which contains his scripts for Night and the City, The Color of Money and Sea of Love — I felt I knew enough to stop reading and start writing. (This sort of self-belief, hubris or downright arrogance, is absolutely essential for the budding screenwriter; after all, if you don’t think you have what it takes to write a script, you’ll never put ribbon to paper.)

The script for my Stigmata spin-off — proposed as an X-Files-type supernatural drama in which a sceptical priest travelled the United States investigating and debunking ‘miracles’ on behalf of the Vatican, while slowly uncovering an evil conspiracy to grow a new Christ from DNA found in the holy cross — turned out rather well. The main character, though inspired by Gabriel Byrne’s turn in Wainwright’s film, could have been played by any actor from late thirties to late fifties, and a connection to the film itself wasn’t essential — the series could easily have stood alone. I even had a title ready: Revelations.

Knowing that MGM, the company behind Stigmata, would not accept an unsolicited submission, I sent the completed script, plus a ‘story arc’ overview and character breakdown, to the film’s director, Rupert Wainwright, via his people at United Talent Agency. A week or two later, he called me to say there was no way MGM would consider a Stigmata spin-off, due (he said) to a breakdown in relations between the studio and Frank Mancuso Jr., who was a contracted party for any Stigmata sequels, prequels, spin-offs or other exploitation. He did, however, like the script. “There’s an idea I had about sixteen years ago,” he said, “and you might be the man to write it.” This was all the encouragement I needed to hop on a plane to Los Angeles in order to hear his pitch in person.

Wainwright and I met in the bar of Hollywood’s famous art deco hotel The Argyll, where the director proceeded, over the course of twenty smoke-fuelled minutes, to tell one of the best stories I had ever heard: inspired by Robert Frazier’s The Golden Bough, it was the tale of a once-famous writer, Tom Weaver, who exiles himself to a remote Greek island, Aricia, in an effort to break his writer’s block. No sooner has Tom been shipwrecked and literally washed up on the shore, than he is attacked by one of the locals in a berserk rage, and forced to defend himself in a fight to the death. Somehow, Tom manages to mortally wound his attacker. He soon finds that the island’s other inhabitants begin to regard him as their new leader, a kind of high priest — and subtle supernatural powers (not to mention an ethereal beauty) seem to come with the job. Naturally, it’s all very temporary, and Tom quickly discovers that there is a Faustian price to pay for his idyllic existence: every now and then, strangers will come to Aricia to try to kill him, thereby taking his place as ruler of the island paradise.

I began work on the script under the tutelage of Wainwright and his producing partners, Danny Bigel and Michael Mailer (son of the legendary Norman Mailer), producers of such smart indie fare as Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White. Originally titled Killing the Gods, the script evolved over multiple drafts, sometimes edging closer to the tone of The Wicker Man, other times towards The Mosquito Coast, but always improving. By 2005, the project had attracted part-financing from Wainwright’s Stigmata backers MGM, before billionaire backer Bob Yari agreed to finance the entire film, as long as we could find a star of sufficient stature.

Having written the film with Nick Nolte in mind, I was surprised to learn that the first actor to whom the script had been offered was John Cusack — but it was Matthew McConaughey who finally stepped up to play the enviable leading role of Tom Weaver, someone who, in the words of the pitch notes, “has to become a god in order to learn how to be a man.” Alas, with barely a month before the film was due to go before the cameras somewhere in the Aegean Sea, McConaughey jumped ship, preferring to take $2 million to co-star with Al Pacino in Two for the Money (2005) than be paid scale for the lead in After the Gods. Yari agreed to honour his financing offer if the producers could find a star of equivalent stature, but weather conditions in the Aegean meant that filming would have to begin by October at the latest or be postponed until the following year, and without a suitable leading man, After the Gods was washed up.

By this time, I had written two further scripts for the Bigel-Mailer partnership: The Ego Makers, adapted from the novel by real estate mogul Donald Everett Askin, and Nothing to Declare, based on the memoir by millionaire playboy and The Spectator society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos. Both were adaptations of books they had optioned, and which they had sent me with a covering letter more or less asking me to “make them into movie scripts.”

Although the former disappeared in a falling out between the novelist and producers, the latter — the true-life tale of Taki’s incarceration in Pentonville Prison following his conviction for trying to fly into Heathrow Airport a bag of cocaine so large customs could not believe it was for personal use — soon attracted not only a promising director, Malcolm Venville, but also an Oscar-nominated actor with a reputation for edgy, pitch-perfect performances. At the time, Robert Downey Jr. was years away from his comeback box office hits, Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes, and better known for making headlines with his troubled personal life than headlining major motion pictures. Although Nothing to Declare would be an inexpensive film, would-be financiers evidently felt the thrill of seeing Downey Jr. inside a fictional prison did not merit the threat of having their leading actor thrown in an actual prison halfway through filming if he should fall off the wagon. Incredible though it may seem now that he has not one but two giant franchises to his name, Downey Jr. was then uninsurable, making Nothing to Declare non-viable. With The Ego Makers, the script of which I had retitled High Rise, I was now 0 for 3. The only way was up.

Having written or adapted three scripts for third parties, I now felt it was time to write something for myself. Screenwriters often keep files of notes, newspaper and magazine cuttings, one-line pitches and sketchy synopses, in the way that a page torn out of New Scientist might one day become the next Jurassic Park, or an article on ‘humanized’ chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky inspired Rise of the Planet of the Apes.[2] One of my cuttings was a tiny story from a local newspaper, possibly dating back to the 1980s, about a rare and nearly priceless Ferrari that had been destroyed by, of all things, a runaway milk float. What struck me about the story was the fact that the classic car’s destruction had had the knock-on effect of increasing the value of the few other surviving examples of the same car by about £1 million. This got me thinking: if you were a car collector in possession of the second most valuable automobile in the world, what might you do to nobble the competition? Might you persuade a pair of hapless parking valets, for example, who had accidentally crashed your Lamborghini while taking it for a joy ride, to track down, steal and destroy the world’s most priceless automobile — say, a Le Mans race-winning 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO — in order to put your own rare Ferrari in pole position? Especially if the individual in possession of the rarest car was your ex-wife, who had received said vehicle in a divorce settlement, and was about to rub your face in it by donating it to the Ferrari motor museum in Turin?

It took the best part of six months to write the action-comedy-caper script that became 250 GTO (alternative titles included Petrolheads, Grease Monkeys, GTO and — if one dunder-headed producer had had his way — The Ultimate Ride), in which the two unlucky joy-riders are given the only-in-a-movie mission to steal the Ferrari and drive it from Miami to Malibu — a distance of roughly 2,400 miles — in under twenty-four hours, requiring an average speed of 100 miles per hour. Naturally, there are complications — ranging from a dogged insurance adjuster, mercenaries with rocket launchers, mechanical failures, a sexy hitch-hiker, incompetent cops, a rampaging motorcycle gang, and more — enough, I hoped, to make a high-concept script sale. To ensure authenticity, and perhaps inspire a scene or two, I even made the 2,400-mile road trip myself. As I wrote the first draft, a process driven forward by a 1/24th scale model of a bright red Ferrari 250 GTO I kept on my desk, I hoped that some day — if the script should sell for a million bucks, for example — to swap it for a real one. Or, at least, a good replica.

Largely through my own efforts rather than any agent’s, several producers circled the project. One of them flirted with a rights offer but, instead, commissioned me to write a pilot (for his friend and business associate Geena Davis) for a television drama about a female boxing manager — a project which fell apart when (a) Ms Davis became pregnant, and (b) Meg Ryan signed up to play a female boxing manager on film. Another interested party, my former associate Danny Bigel, bit the bullet and took an option out on 250 GTO, for the princely sum of one dollar. In compliance with Hollywood custom, I didn’t even get the cash. At least I could have framed it, for posterity. Bigel and I spent several months on the script, undertaking a major re-engineering of the story and characters, and tinkering under the hood, until it was ready to roll out on to the forecourt and offer for sale. Bigel even managed to attach a director who seemed ideally suited to the job: Marc Schölermann, Germany’s pre-eminent maker of car commercials.

Scholermann gave terrific notes, and the 250 GTO remodel slowly took shape over the course of several months in the spring of 2005, mostly involving fine-tuning existing scenes and ‘punching up’ the main characters. When Herbie: Fully Loaded opened ‘soft’ — i.e., below expectations — in June of that year, my agents suggested that we wait until the opening of “the next car movie” before sending out the script. We didn’t have to wait long: when The Dukes of Hazzard was released to a $30 million weekend in August, my agents let it be known that the script for the next big car movie was available to read.

Several studio representatives requested the script; one or two even requested ‘coverage’ on it — the process by which executives avoid reading scripts for themselves, sending it out to ‘readers’ who will describe the pros and cons of the project, and recommend whether to bid on it or pass. One producer who liked the script was Neil Moritz, but with sequels to The Fast and the Furious and xXx on his slate, he felt it might be “one car picture too many,” and ultimately passed. For now, 250 GTO was in limbo — at least, until the next “car picture” hit big, and Hollywood came calling again.

In fact, the script delivered a new opportunity: to go in and pitch to the head of development at Morgan Creek, the company behind numerous good films, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The executive in question, Beth Babyak, had read and liked 250 GTO. To my surprise, this apparently qualified me to rewrite a prequel to one of the most respected, successful, controversial and genuinely terrifying horror films in history: The Exorcist. At that time, Morgan Creek was wondering what to do with writer-director Paul Schrader’s Exorcist: The Beginning, which dealt with Father Merrin’s first encounter with evil. On paper, it had looked good: Schrader had written Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, and directed several well-received films, notably Affliction. His script for the Exorcist prequel, set in the 1940s, sees Merrin fighting personal demons in Africa — including a rejection of his faith brought on by a Nazi atrocity in which he was forced to participate — when archaeologists unearth a long-buried Satanic church, unleashing the Devil, or a close relation. So far, so good. Best of all, Schrader had cast Stellan Skarsgard, a dead ringer for the original film’s Max Von Sydow, in the lead.

The trouble, according to the studio, was that Schrader had delivered a $40 million film with a major flaw; one which, while problematic for a regular horror film, was disastrous for an Exorcist movie: It wasn’t scary. “Paul’s version was very cerebral,” Morgan Creek boss Jim Robinson told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “I had concerns as to how well it would play to the mass audience.” What could be done? Well, the producers reasoned, Paul Schrader could be fired, for a start. (Check.) (“I’ve been living in a world of righteous paranoia [ever since],” he commented later.) Next, director Renny Harlin — best known for Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, and whose contribution to the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise had its moments — could be drafted in to direct re-shoots that would hopefully ‘bring the scary’. (Check.) You could then bring in an untried screenwriter with no experience of horror films except a lifelong obsession with them — yours truly. (Check.) What they needed, they said, was a whole new ending — and maybe a few small scenes to sprinkle throughout the film to crank up the fear. I sat down and began to read...

Roughly fifty pages into the 100-page script, the fear set in. Pages turned with increasing speed. Nails were bitten down. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Not because it was scary — although, if directed and edited properly, it should have been — but because it was good. What were they thinking, I wondered? How was I supposed to fix something that wasn’t broken? Then — thank God — I got to page seventy-five, at which point the story fell apart so quickly it was as though the script had been passed through a shredder. Schrader had dropped the ball — proving, yet again, that the best writers in the world are rubbish when it comes to endings. I immediately knew what to do. How to fix it. How to save it. How to, in essence, cast out its demons — whatever had possessed Schrader to ruin his own film. By way of research, I rented The Exorcist (exceptional), Exorcist II: The Heretic (excrement) and Exorcist III (excellent), watched them back to back, and sat down to write my notes.

The script had posited the idea that the demonic church had been built in Derati, Africa, on the spot where Lucifer himself was rumoured to have landed when he was cast out of Heaven. My idea was to take this a step further — to make it not only the location of the Devil’s descent, but of his mortal remains: the bones of the very Devil himself! Not only would this explain the various manifestations and possessions which were occurring as the church was excavated, but it would also tie in nicely to the prologue of The Exorcist, in which Merrin’s face grows ashen as he looks at a small idol carved in the image of the demon Pazuzu. We could, I suggested, add a line of dialogue explaining the African tradition (of my own devising) by which certain tribes carve idols from one of the bones of their dead, in order to keep the spirit of a lost loved one closer to the tribe, setting up the idea that one of the Devil’s bones has been carved into an idol.

This would also serve to create a more powerful ending: in order to defeat the Devil, who has possessed Merrin’s lover, Sarah, he must not only regain his faith (as in Schrader’s draft), but also give Lucifer’s bones a proper Christian burial. This becomes the key element of the film’s climax, and puts Merrin firmly in the driving seat: not only must he perform an exorcism on Sarah while she is possessed, he must also perform a burial ceremony to consecrate the Devil’s mortal remains. Except, of course, that one of the bones is missing... This could, I reasoned, be discovered as he begins the burial ceremony, setting up a new ending whereby the Devil’s skeleton — complete with vestigial tail bones and, of course, skeletal wings like those of a bat — comes temporarily back to life, re-animating and screaming hideously as it first grows flesh and muscle and leathery skin, and is ultimately destroyed, crumbling to dust as Merrin performs the last rites upon it. When the Devil’s bones are re-animated, Merrin will realise that there is a bone missing — and we can presume he spent the next twenty-four years (between the events of Exorcist: The Beginning and The Exorcist) searching for the missing bone, which has been carved into the form of an idol.

I knew the new ending would be expensive. But I also knew that Renny Harlin was looking for a kick-ass climax with plenty of action and special effects. What could be more climactic than a final showdown between Father Merrin and the Devil himself? But I also had a coup de théâtre up my sleeve: a nifty coda that would serve to undercut the relatively “happy” ending.

After the putative ending, I suggested, we would fade to black for a few moments... but then fade up to dawn in the desert, much like the beginning of both The Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning. The audience would assume they were still in the past — until a Hummer pulls into shot, stopping in the middle of what has now become an oil field. A big oil company man (a Joe Don Baker type, I casually suggested, in a ten gallon hat) gets out of the giant car, mad as hell because the drilling has been shut down. The oil man is told that this has occurred because workers have made a find of great archaeological and religious significance — a church dating back to the sixth century, possibly older (as per the events of the film thus far). He curses, spits, and says, “Here we go again,” presumably a reference to other occasions when his company’s oil exploration has been frustrated by one thing or another. But the audience would also know that the drilling has probably disturbed the Devil’s remains, and that the next sequel in the series will be set in the present day. Exorcist: The Next Generation anyone?

I had the weekend to work out the details: my follow-up meeting was on Monday morning. I pitched my notes to Beth Babyak, who showed much enthusiasm for my ideas, thanked me for my efforts, and told me she would pass the ideas on to Mr Harlin. Although they ultimately passed on my ‘take’, and none of my ideas made it into the finished film, they liked my work enough to invite me to pitch on other projects, one of which was a supernatural thriller in the Exorcist vein. It was another year before Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning hit cinemas, grossing just $44 million and prompting critics to wonder what had possessed Morgan Creek to make it in the first place. Meanwhile, Schrader kept fighting to get his movie seen, eventually convincing Warner Bros to release the film in cinemas — the same weekend as Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. “Not everyone can go see Star Wars,” reasoned Morgan Creek’s Jim Robinson. Unfortunately, everybody did.

By this time, I was getting regular offers to rewrite other people’s projects, only one of which — two drafts and a ‘polish’ of the Brit-com I Want Candy — ever saw the light of a projector. At the same time, I pursued my own ideas, including a science fiction comedy, Last Man in Space; a superhero comedy, Really Super Heroes; a gory horror film, Spores, based on a strange fungus that attacks the central nervous system; and finally, my first attempt at a serious drama: the story of a woman emerging from an abusive relationship, entitled The Bends and described by my old friend Darren Aronofsky as a “challenging and disturbing piece of work... very upsetting and moving, [with] a great dark tone, a la Secretary or something Lynch would do. I think it needs to be made,” he added, helpfully. Needless to say, it never has been.

In the meantime, I had written two further films to order. Firstly, an adaptation of an unpublished novel (two words to strike fear into anyone’s heart) entitled Vengeance from the Deep, a preposterous and probably unpublishable doorstop in which an ‘Indiana Jones type’ teams up with a ‘Lara Croft type’ to battle a megalodon (prehistoric shark) menacing holidaymakers on the South African coast. Secondly, two drafts of an ingenious and highly entertaining whodunit, based on Donald McCormick’s out-of-print novel yarn Hell Fire Club, in which Benjamin Franklin, on a visit to England in the 1750s, uses the latest scientific techniques to investigate a series of murders at the notorious occultists’ society. Although I was paid in each case, both projects went precisely nowhere. They did, however, allow me time to work on my next original script, one which I felt might finally break the deadlock.

The idea was a post-9/11 thriller entitled Airborne, in which the passengers of a commercial airliner flying between London and Los Angeles are struck by an outbreak of a rare and deadly Ebola-like virus. With the contagion spreading, one airport after another refuses permission for the stricken plane to land, while time — and fuel — begins to run short. The hero, a morally compromised family doctor who is on board with his lover, must work with the cabin crew to try to arrest the spread of the virulent disease, while the pilot and co-pilot attempt to land the plane — before Homeland Security decides to shoot them down.

Inspired, ironically, by a throwaway line in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone — “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a 24-hour plane flight from every city on earth” — it was pitched either as “Outbreak meets Airport,” or “Outbreak on an airplane”, just the kind of high concept Hollywood loves. By now, I was being represented by the UK branch of the William Morris Agency, and the first potential producer my British agents, Tamara and Lucinda, managed to interest was the BBC, where Paul Greengrass, acclaimed director of Bloody Sunday (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004), became intrigued by the possibility of using the project as the basis of a new kind of television event.

Instead of a two-hour film, Greengrass proposed that the central idea could be split into eight separate one-hour episodes, each telling the story — still essentially “Outbreak on an airplane” — from a different perspective (like Rashomon), and a different, yet partly overlapping timeline (like Pulp Fiction). Thus, Episode 1 would be the germ of the story, as two ordinary employees of a Los Angeles copy shop are made privy to terrorist plans for an Airborne Toxic Event which has nothing to do with the indie rock band of that name; Episode 2 would unfold at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention as experts assess the implications of the stricken airliner; Episode 3 details communications between the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security, where secret plans are drawn up to shoot down the aircraft where the airborne toxins on board can do the least harm; Episode 4 takes place in the crucible of the terrorist action — the terrorist cell itself; Episode 5 at Number 10 Downing Street; and so on.

As a linking device, each episode would begin with a tantalising pre-credit sequence showing what’s happening aboard the aircraft, building tension and suspense towards the climactic events of Episode 8 which, everyone would know, would be set aboard the aircraft itself and provide a devastating denouement.

Perhaps best of all, once the entire series had been shown on television in its non-linear original format, with each episode from a new perspective, it could then be re-edited — for inclusion on the DVD — as one massive eight-hour blockbuster, now presented in chronological order, with traditional inter-cutting. It was, to my mind, the kind of thinking that made Paul Greengrass the most exciting British director to emerge from television since Martin Campbell. I couldn’t wait to set to work on the outline, and then what was likely to be an epic 500-page script.

It took the best part of a week — and the worst parts as well — to draft the outline, which broke the basic storyline into eight disparate parts, and split the characters, key events and interlocking timelines into their respective episodes — crucially, in a way that would allow them to be put back together at some point (much like Memento was re-edited to play chronologically as an ‘Easter egg’ on the UK DVD). Each episode stood on its own merits while dovetailing perfectly with the non-linear timeline, and the differing perspectives added to, and drove, the story in compelling ways, building to the climax aboard the plane. By the time the final episode, entitled ‘The Eleventh Hour’, was due to broadcast, the tension would be unbearable, and — if all went to plan — the entire country would tune in for the finale. With a director as white-hot as Paul Greengrass on board, we were as good as green lit at the BBC. Unfortunately, I hadn’t reckoned on the one man who might reject his audacious, ground-breaking and entirely brilliant idea: Paul Greengrass himself.

His problem, now that he had seen it all mapped out, was that he didn’t think viewers would tune in, week after week, when the point-of-view would keep changing. “They’ll just get into one set of characters,” he reasoned, “and when they tune in the following week, there’ll be a whole different bunch of people in a different setting, in a different country.” “Exactly!” I enthused, amazed by the genius of the whole thing. “And each week, the pre-credits sequence will give them a horrifying glimpse of what’s going on aboard Flight 401, while the rest of the episode details the CDC’s attempts to save them, or Homeland Security’s plot to shoot them down, or the British government’s efforts to land them safely...” But Greengrass was firm: although he liked the movie-set-on-an-airplane idea — his next film was United 93 — the multiple-angle angle was a deal breaker: as far as this director was concerned, Airborne was grounded.

Undeterred by this setback, I immediately set about re-imagining Airborne not as a gargantuan television event, but a stripped-down ‘bottle show’ — that is, a film or TV movie set primarily in a single location — which represented the most ‘makeable’ version of the story. Out went the multiple perspectives, vast cast of characters, and globe-trotting storyline — all that would have to wait for the surer hand of Steven Soderbergh, some years later. Instead, over one hundred tightly scripted pages, I boiled the story down to its essence, beginning with (what I hoped the critics would call) a virtuoso single-take meet-the-passengers scene at Heathrow Airport, closely followed by takeoff and the first passenger getting sick. This time, the entire story would take place inside the plane itself, only cutting outside the plane for the first and final shots of the film. Not only would this give the audience the same sense of claustrophobia as the passengers, it would — more pertinently, for a screenwriter with my scant connections — make it much easier to finance, since almost the entire film would be set inside a specially constructed (and possibly borrowed) airliner set, such as the one built for Flight Plan, which came out in 2005, stealing a little — but not all — of Airborne’s thunder.

Once again, prolific producer Neal Moritz (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Fast and the Furious) was among the first to bite. Unfortunately, his right hand man felt that, with the events of 9/11 still relatively fresh in audiences’ memories, and wish-fulfilment payback playing out on episodes of 24 and the newly jingoistic nightly news, Airborne needed a villain. Like a good lawyer, I would have cited precedent, “Hollywood vs J.V. Hart,” The Hot Zone [See Chapter 10], attempting to convince the executive in question that the virus was the villain. “Well, what if the villain was a terrorist?” he countered. “What if a terrorist had brought the virus on board — or, better still, they were flying the virus somewhere and it accidentally got loose on the plane.” In an effort to sidestep such an obviously signposted banana skin, I decided to gauge the seriousness of Moritz’s number two by suggesting that he pay me to rewrite the script to order. “It’s just that I’ve got to do a paid rewrite on another project,” I lied. “It’s forty thousand dollars I can’t afford to turn down.” “So you’re saying,” the executive reasoned, the cogs turning almost visibly, “if I pay you forty thousand dollars you could start rewriting Airborne immediately, and we’d own the project?” “Well, I suppose...” I deadpanned. “That’s great!” he enthused. I never heard from them again.

By this point, I had figured that the best way to get a movie made might be to write a micro-budget movie so absurdly cheap it could be made for next to nothing. Through the filmmaking community Shooting People, I learned that a group of film students at York University had been offered the use of the campus during the summer break and were looking for an ultra-low budget feature film to make as their class project. Their story was fiendishly simple: two groups of volunteers are sequestered away in a remote laboratory (closely resembling the campus of York University) for six months, in order to test the theory or effects of something-or-other (in my version, the possibility of a manned trip to Mars), only to emerge and find the outside world overrun with feral creatures, closely modelled on the ‘running zombies’ of 28 Days Later and the Day of the Dead remake.

At the time, cinemas were not yet overrun with low-budget zombie flicks, nor had the post-modernisation of the zombie movie (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, et al.) really taken root, and if you were going to make a film for next to nothing — and you had access to some cheap but effective prosthetic effects — you could do a lot worse than make a zombie movie. Thus, after a brief visit to the university to meet the potential cast and crew and get the lay of the location, I set to work on the script, which came together in more or less a week flat. Alas, by the time it came to make the film, the students had all had a big falling-out, and decided not to spend their summer break making a zombie flick for more or less the price of a gastropub lunch.

The script, entitled Inhuman Remains, eventually reverted to me, and was later optioned by Joel Stevens Entertainment for the princely sum of $500 — almost, but not quite, enough to cover my legal costs for the ‘deal’. Unfortunately (there’s that word again), by the time Mr Stevens got around to shopping the script around the marketplace, there were more low-budget zombie films in Hollywood than there were actors working as waiters, and Inhuman Remains fell into yet another circle of Development Hell. As each new zombie film emerged, fewer and fewer of the ideas in Inhuman Remains remained original, until Dead Set and The Crazies remake, between them, put the final nails in its coffin. Although the option was renewed in early 2011, and I was asked to do a minor rewrite to move the setting to the US, it seemed unlikely that Inhuman Remains was ever going to get up and walk around by itself.

As all this was happening — or, more accurately, not happening — my “Outbreak on an airplane” project, Airborne, looked set to take off once more: this time, the interested producer was one with an impressively long track record, stretching back to The Getaway, and encompassing The Thing, Short Circuit and, more recently, The Mask of Zorro, a surprise hit for Sony Pictures. Over several drafts, the script was honed and tightened by this producer and his assistant, both of whom gave exceptionally good notes, and in early 2011 an up-and-coming director became loosely attached to the project, giving good notes of his own. Progress became sluggish, however, as the producers became heavily involved with their remake-cum-prequel of The Thing, and it was not until the success of Steven Soderbergh’s viral-outbreak film Contagion, later that year, that the script became active again.

In the interim, however, the same producers had invited me to pitch for the most exciting project I had worked on in my patchy screenwriting ‘career,’ which had so far encompassed ten unproduced feature films and a few well-received shorts, one or two of which I had produced myself, just to be sure they were actually made. The project was a feature film based on the T.J. Hooker television show of the early 1980s, in which William Shatner had played a fatherly Los Angeles police officer, arguably too old to still be in uniform, but too belligerent to trade it for a career in politics — a little like Captain Kirk in the Star Trek movies. Thirty years on, the idea was to re-invent the show as an action comedy, with a comic actor like Kevin James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) or Will Ferrell (The Other Guys) playing T.J. Hooker Junior, a hopeless police patrolman who has only managed to hold on to his job with the Los Angeles Police Department because his father was such a legend. And who else could play the original T.J. Hooker but William Shatner, in his late seventies, but still starring in a weekly TV show, Boston Legal.

Screenwriters Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson had been working on a story outline for almost two years without actually commencing work on a script, and I was determined to win the job for myself. The creator and producer of T.J. Hooker, Rick Husky, had read and been impressed by my script for Airborne, which suggested I might be capable of handling the action elements of T.J. Hooker: The Movie, which, as with comedy-flavoured action films like Rush Hour and Lethal Weapon, would be played ‘straight’, so that the jeopardy is real. After all, we reasoned, the villains don’t know they’re in a comedy — and neither, for that matter, do the heroes. By the time I flew out to Hollywood to pitch the project to the producers, Husky had read my earlier action-comedy, 250 GTO, and decided my kind of funny wasn’t his kind of funny. This was going to be a tough crowd. I pride myself on being “good in a room,” however, and pitched the shit out of my take on T.J. Hooker: The Movie. Against all odds, I got the gig.

Over the next few months, guided by Husky and the other producers, I wrote the very first draft of the script, loosely based on the storyline set up by Maddock and Wilson, but utilising many elements suggested by the producers, and many more of my own. Having grown up watching T.J. Hooker — hey, there were only three channels back then — and being the son of a police officer myself, I felt as deep an affinity to the material as anyone — except, perhaps, Messrs Husky and Shatner. By the time I had finished the second draft, the action was exciting and inventive, the characters fresh and funny, the set pieces spectacular and original. Finally, and crucially, I believed that the script had the correct tone — unlike, say, the misbegotten update of ’70s cop show Starsky and Hutch.

The script was delivered in the spring of 2010, and I sat back and waited for the Variety and Hollywood Reporter announcements the producers had promised: that they had signed not one but two exciting projects from a hot ‘new’ writer by the name of David Hughes: the breathtaking thriller Airborne, and the hilarious and action-packed reboot of ’80s TV series T.J. Hoolker.

Then, in June 2010, The A-Team — a comedy-leavened action film based on a popular ’80s TV show — opened at US cinemas, to mediocre reviews and lacklustre box office. “There is no Plan B,” trumpeted the posters — and it was true: by the time The A-Team slipped quietly from view a few weeks later, Husky had put T.J. Hooker back in a drawer, figuring that the world wasn’t in the mood for clever reinventions of ’80s TV shows. Not since Mike Myers had decided to turn down Paramount Pictures’ offer to adapt his Saturday
Night Live ‘Sprockets’ sketch into a feature film[3] had a creator-producer so deliberately torpedoed his own project, for fear of failure. With Shatner having turned eighty, and becoming increasingly difficult to insure for action scenes — even though he was more than capable of performing them — it seemed as though T.J. Hooker would never be made as we had imagined it, if at all.

Over the course of nine scripts, I had passed through all nine Dantean Circles of Development Hell, before finally landing in the Circle to which all unproduced scripts are ultimately consigned.

You guessed it: Limbo.

_____________

1 The psychological and professional jealousy aspects of Perfect Blue could also be said to bear a certain resemblance to Aronofsky’s Oscar-winning Black Swan.

2 I remember reading a fascinating article about mathematician John W. Nash Jr. in Vanity Fair, and naively calling the magazine to ask after the availability of the film rights, only to be told that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard had beaten me to it. A lucky thing, as my script would probably have turned out more like Sam I Am than A Beautiful Mind.

3 The fact that Myers felt that The Love Guru was sufficiently hilarious to go ahead and make may offer some insight as to the comedic value of Dieter, the script of which has been unofficially circulated.

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS

Note: Quotes taken from author interviews are marked AI. All available information on sources is given. Any omissions will be corrected in future editions where possible.

INTRODUCTION

Page 9: “Trying to make a movie...” Douglas Adams, quoted in ‘Douglas Adams’ by Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 15 May 2001. “The writer turns in a script...” is from Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade by Jane Hamsher, New York: Broadway Books, 1997. Page 10: “Everybody gives writers notes...” Richard Friedenberg, AI. “In Hollywood, ideas are anathema...” Gary Goldman, AI. “tweaking a draft...” William Farmer, AI.

DISILLUSIONED

Page 15: “They wanted Indiana Jones...” and all other Ted Henning quotes, AI. “This was the gentleman who...” and all other quotes from Lee Batchler, quoted in the BBC Radio production Development Hell, produced by Neil Rosser, 2011. Page 16: “As we researched...” and all other quotes from Janet Scott Batchler, AI. “Manipulating the laws of physics...”; “Whatever days I have left” are from the unproduced screenplay Smoke and Mirrors by Lee and Janet Scott Batchler. Page 18: “Sounds great...” Jay Stern, quoted in The Big Deal by Thom Taylor, New York: William Morrow, 1999. “I’m looking for a million” Alan Gasmer, ibid. Page 19: “I don’t know if they got an answer...”; “I was concerned...” Stern, ibid. Page 20: “We thought it was a wonderful script...” and all other quotes from Andrew G. Vajna, quoted in the BBC Radio production Development Hell, produced by Neil Rosser, 2011. Page 23: “Houdin travels to Algeria...” and all other ‘Stax’ quotes from ‘The Stax Report: Script Review of Smoke & Mirrors’ at IGN FilmForce (filmforce.ign.com), 19 December 2000. Page 26: “The fact-based story...” quoted in ‘Douglas, Zeta-Jones stoked for Smoke & Mirrors’, uncredited, Variety, 22 May 2001.

MONKEY BUSINESS

Page 31: “I thought it was gonna be fantastic...” and all other Don Murphy quotes, AI. “He told me the story...” and other Arthur P. Jacobs quotes, from ‘Dialogues on Apes, Apes and More Apes’ by Dale Winogura, Cinefantastique, Summer 1972. Page 32: “I never thought it could be made...” Pierre Boulle, ibid. “The novel was singularly uncinematic,” and other Charlton Heston quotes from In the Arena by Charlton Heston, London: HarperCollins, 1995. Page 33: “The make-up was crude...” John Chambers, quoted in original 20th Century Fox production notes for Planet of the Apes. Page 34: “I disliked, somewhat, the ending...” Boulle, quoted in ‘Dialogues on Apes, Apes and More Apes’ by Dale Winogura, Cinefantastique, Summer 1972. “Whether by design or accident...” Maurice Evans, quoted in original 20th Century Fox production notes for Planet of the Apes. “I had never thought of this picture...” Franklin J Schaffner, ibid. Page 35: “I had always been a huge Planet Of The Apes fan...”; “but not a sequel to the 5th film...”; “Spartacus with Apes...” Adam Rifkin, AI. Page 36: “The legend throughout the humans...” Rifkin, quoted in ‘Evolution’ by Daniel Argent, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “Fox was dead set on making this movie...”; “As soon as I was to turn in the cut down script...”; Page 37: “quite unexpectedly and unceremoniously replaced...” Rifkin, AI. “[Fox wanted] a happy, harmonious ending...” Rifkin, quoted in ‘Evolution’ by Daniel Argent, Creative Screenwriting, July/ August 2001. “Eventually the script evolved to a place...” and all remaining Adam Rifkin quotes, AI. Page 38: “I imagine the conversation going something like this...”; “I watched the original movies again...” are from Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade by Jane Hamsher, New York: Broadway Books, 1997. “What if there were discovered cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes...” Oliver Stone, ibid. Page 39: “Oliver Stone got Fox to take exactly...” ibid. “Oliver’s notion is kind of in the Joseph...” Hamsher, quoted in ‘Fox Goes Ape for Stone’ by Leonard Klady, Variety, 14 December 1993. “I never worked out how to get back...” is from the unproduced script Return of the Apes by Terry Hayes. Page 40: “one of the best scripts he ever read”; “What if our main guy finds himself in Ape land...”; “incredibly stupid” are from Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade by Jane Hamsher, New York: Broadway Books, 1997. Page 41: “What we tried to do was a story...” Sam Hamm, quoted in ‘Evolution’ by Daniel Argent, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “once-proud porcelain features...” is from the unproduced Planet of the Apes screenplay by Sam Hamm. Page 42: “Schwarzenegger ... is talking with Jim Cameron...” quoted in ‘Arnold Wants Forman to take Wings’ by Army Archerd, Variety, 28 January 1997. “I’m fourty-four...” James Cameron, quoted in Premiere, November 1998. “I would have gone in a very different direction” Cameron, quoted in ‘Ape Crusaders’ by Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly, 27 April 2001. “The original movie is about race in America...” Albert Hughes, quoted in ‘New Jack City’ by Ian Freer, Empire, February 2002. “We wanted to take the premise...” Allen Hughes, ibid. Page 43: “[Fox president] Tom Rothman called...” and other William Broyles, Jr. quotes are from ‘Evolution’ by Daniel Argent, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “I wasn’t interested in doing a remake or a sequel...”; “introduce new characters and other story elements...” Tim Burton, quoted in 20th Century Fox production notes for Planet of the Apes. “When you say ‘Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Tim Burton’ in the same breath...”; “[Broyles] came up with the characters...”, Richard D. Zanuck, ibid. Page 44: “We did some work on the script...” Burton, quoted in a commentary for the Planet of the Apes DVD, circa 2001. Page 45: “Tim had three months to edit the film...” Estella Warren, quoted in ‘Estella’ by Justin Quirk, Arena, May 2003. “would have cost $300 million”; “I’m fascinated by the studio technique...” Burton, quoted in The Independent, reported by JAM! Showbiz, www.canoe.ca
Page 46: “Can I explain the Planet of the Apes ending...” Tim Roth, quoted in ‘Empire Awards 2002’, Empire, April 2002. “I thought it made sense...” Helena Bonham Carter, quoted in ‘Helena Bonham Carter’ by Mark Salisbury, Total Film, December 2001. “Let’s say Fox wants to make...” Burton, quoted in a commentary for the Planet of the Apes DVD, circa 2001. “Rick has always kept a file...” Amanda Silver, quoted in ‘Interview with Rise of the Planet of the Apes Screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver’, theforbidden-zone.com, August 2011. Page 47: “We laid out the story...”; Page 48: “When we started this...” Rick Jaffa, quoted in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes Screenwriters: We Pictured A Trilogy” by Darren Franih, EW.com, August 2011.

CAST INTO MOUNT DOOM

Page 49: “When Gandalf is vanquished...” John Boorman, quoted on The South Bank Show edited and presented by Melvyn Bragg, LWT Productions, 2001. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” is from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, London: Allen & Unwin, 1937. “My work has escaped from my control...” J.R.R. Tolkien, quoted in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Page 50: “I had no sooner landed in London...” and all other Forrest J Ackerman quotes, AI. “I should welcome the idea...”; “entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’...”; “very unhappy about the extreme silliness...” Tolkien, quoted in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien, New York: HarperCollins 1985. Page 52: “The problem was that, because Tolkien was not a regular moviegoer...” Brian Sibley, quoted in ‘Middle-Earth Man’, uncredited, Starlog, January 2002. “We talked about it for a while...” Paul McCartney, quoted in Beatles at the Movies by Roy Carr, London: UFOMusic, 1996. “After reading the book...” and all other Gene Deitch quotes, quoted in How to Succeed In Animation (Don’t Let A Little Thing Like Failure Stop You) by Gene Deitch, published on awn.com/genedeitch. Page 54: “as a kind of opera, or a sort of...” and all other Heinz Edelmann quotes are from ‘Tolkien: The Road Not Taken’ by Ross Pleset, Outre, circa 2001. Page 55: “like a Fellini movie in a never-land...” and all other Rospo Pallenberg quotes, ibid. Page 56: “When you’re faced with adapting...” Peter Jackson, quoted on The South Bank Show edited and presented by Melvyn Bragg, LWT Productions, 2001. “[We] used to get the giggles...” Boorman, ibid. Page 57: “Look – only seven colours...” is from the unproduced Lord of the Rings screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg. “I was a Tolkien fan...” and all other Ralph Bakshi quotes, AI. Page 60: “that was the key to it”, Jackson, quoted in ‘The Once and Future King’ by Jenny Cooney Carillo, Dreamwatch, October 2003. “presents the characters that people love, and...” Jackson, quoted on The South Bank Show edited and presented by Melvyn Bragg, LWT Productions, 2001. “It’s a huge uphill struggle...” Boorman, ibid.

WE CAN REWRITE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE

Page 61: “Ron [Shusett] said, ‘You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version...” David Cronenberg, AI. Page 62: “I think it was probably 1974...”; “This was the first story...” Ronald D. Shusett, quoted in the Artisan documentary Imagining Total Recall, circa 2001. “Ronny Shusett walked into my apartment...”; “Dick’s story is short...”; “Quaid, Earth’s top secret agent...” Dan O’Bannon, quoted in ‘Dan O’Bannon On Why It Doesn’t Work’ by Carl Brandon, Cinefantastique, April 1991. Page 63: “At the that time I was not a Philip Dick fan...” Cronenberg, quoted in David Cronenberg by Serge Grünberg, Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2000. “It’s a good thing I had a computer...” Cronenberg, AI. “I didn’t want to do it as serious...” Shusett, AI. “I went to Dino...” Cronenberg, quoted in David Cronenberg by Serge Grunberg, Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2000. Page 64: “Cronenberg quit for a number of reasons...” Shusett, quoted in ‘The Bizarre Mars of David Cronenberg’ by Bill Florence, Cinefantastique, April 1991. “It’s dead for me now...” Cronenberg, quoted in David Cronenberg by Serge Grünberg, Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2000. Page 65 “First of all, I really wanted to cast William Hurt...” Cronenberg, AI. “Quaid takes a cab driven by Benny...” is from ‘The Bizarre Mars of David Cronenberg’ by Bill Florence, Cinefantastique, April 1991. Page 65: “They were creatures that lived in the sewers...” and other Ron Miller quotes are from ‘The Bizarre Mars of David Cronenberg’ by Bill Florence, Cinefantastique, April 1991. Page 66: “I thought it was a bad movie...” Cronenberg, quoted in David Cronenberg by Serge Grunberg, Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2000. “With Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main part...” Paul Verhoeven, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. “Also I thought it was very tacky...” Cronenberg, quoted in David Cronenberg by Serge Grünberg, Paris: Cahiers Du Cinema, 2000. “As I recall it was seven directors...” Shusett, quoted in the Artisan documentary Imagining Total Recall, circa 2001. Page 67: “I was asked to do a polish” and all other Gary Goldman quotes, AI. “Within a few hours...” Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. “In 1981, eight years before I got the movie financed...” and all remaining Shusett quotes, AI. “about thirty” Verhoeven, AI. Page 68: “Everything we have seen before...” Verhoeven, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. “What’s bullshit? That you’re having a paranoid episode...” is dialogue from Total Recall. “That’s the great thing about the movie...” Schwarzenegger, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. “As much as possible...” Verhoeven, AI. “You are a top operative under deep cover...” is dialogue from Total Recall. Page 69: “McClane tells him everything...”; “That part of the narrative...” Verhoeven, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. Page 70: “I think we were a very writer-friendly group...”; “There was an introduction...” Verhoeven, quoted in commentary for Total Recall DVD. p74 “Somebody whose name I won’t name...” Verhoeven, AI. Page 76: “This is the perfect franchise opportunity...” Bob Weinstein, quoted in ‘Recall in New Dimension’ by Rex Weiner and Anita M. Busch, Daily Variety, 15 January 1997. Page 76: “Immediately after turning in that script...” and all other Matthew Cirulnick quotes, AI. p79 “actively involved” is from ‘Dimension eyes Recall 2’ by Benedict Carver and Chris Petrikin, Daily Variety, 12 May 1998. Page 80: “I’m very jazzed...” Jonathan Frakes, quoted in ‘Inside Trek’ by Ian Spelling, www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6952/st9.htm, March 1998. “Arnold is serious...” Frakes, quoted in interview with Louis B. Hobson, Calgary Sun, circa December 1998. “waiting for Mr Schwarzenegger’s hands to free up...” Frakes, quoted in uncredited interview on Tripod (www.tripod.com), circa 1998. “Totall Recall is an old movie...” Frakes, quoted in Starburst, February 2000. Page 82: “That way, should we want to betray the agency...”; “Scientists say the Mars explosion...” are from unproduced script for Total Recall 2 by Matthew Cirulnick. Page 86: “Nowadays I think it’s hard...” Vincent Moore, quoted in ‘Vincent Moore has Total Recall’ by Steve Sunu, comicbookresources.com, 27 April 2011. “After all, the real one...” is from ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ by Philip K. Dick.

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES

Page 87: “I was done with the...” Steven Spielberg, quoted in Dreamwatch, January 2003. “reading scripts” Harrison Ford, quoted at Venice Film Festival press conference, circa 1994. Page 88: “Indy was always...” “He got very excited...” George Lucas, quoted in a documentary included on the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ DVD, circa 2003. “I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to direct.” Spielberg, ibid. “I said, ‘All right...’” Lucas, ibid. “Larry added.” Spielberg, ibid. “I was really tired.” Spielberg, quoted in ‘Indiana Jones and the Ultimate Tribute’ by Ian Freer, Empire, October 2006. Page 89: “I didn’t want him to be.” Lucas, quoted in a documentary included on the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ DVD, circa 2003. Page 90: “When Jones gets wind...” is from ‘From Speed to Ford Escort’ by Baz Bamigboye, Daily Mail, 11 November 1994. “Baz Bamigboye was hungry for stories...” anonymous, AI. “While Nazis and various cultists...” is from ‘Indy IV Delayed’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 21 March 1995. Page 92: “About a year later...” and other Robert Smith quotes are from interview with Charles Deemer of the Internet Screenwriters Network, circa 1996. “In a New York minute...” Ford, quoted in interview with Barbara Walters, 24 March 1997. Page 93: “We’re working on a screenplay...” George Lucas, quoted at press conference for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, circa 1997. Page 93: “The script had to do with the lost city...” is from ‘Indy IV Draft That Will Never Be!!’ by Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 24 October 1997. Page 94: “a fake or at the very least...” is from Cinescape, 11 April 1998. “We finished the script...” is from Cinescape Online (www.cinescape.com), 17 May 1998. “they would probably stick with...” is from Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 27 May 1998. “We just haven’t really settled...” Ford, quoted in interview with Earvin Johnson on Magic Hour, 9 June 1998. “The Indiana Jones 4 hat...” Spielberg, quoted in interview with Cindy Pearlman, Chicago Herald-Tribune, circa July 1998. “We don’t have a start date...” Spielberg, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 25 July 1998. “there is no official...” Paramount spokesperson, quoted in AI for Empire, November 1998. Page 95: “The script, labelled as the final draft...” is from Indyfan.com, 2 December 1998. “The Russians, having packed Indy...” is from ‘Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods’ screenplay by Frank Darabont, 4 April 2003. Page 96: “Indy, working in Egypt...” is from Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 13 December 1998. Page 97: “The two of us wrote...” Michael Prentice, quoted in interview with Micah Johnson, Indyfan.com, circa January 1999. “We’ve got a fantastic script...” McCallum, quoted at press conference for Lucasfilm/ LucasArts, 14 July 1999. Page 98: “It takes place...” Makman, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 17 July 1999. “I’m still quite fit...” Ford, quoted on Entertainment Tonight, 15 September 1999. “All I’m waiting for...” Lucas, quoted on Entertainment Tonight, circa October 1999. “ready when they’re ready” Ford, quoted on E! Online, circa October 1999. Page 99: “We don’t want the fourth...” Spielberg, quoted on Cinescape Insider and elsewhere, circa October 1999. “If there was a script...” Patricia McQueeney, quoted in interview with Jeannie Williams, USA Today, 24 January 2000. “everybody having commitments...” McCallum, quoted in The Sunday Express, circa 2000. “Steven and George will not...” Ford, quoted on The Big Breakfast, 22 November 1999. “Harrison isn’t too old...” Spielberg, quoted in interview with Larry King on Larry King Live, 10 December 1999. “I want it to happen...” Ford, quoted on Inside the Actor’s Studio, 15 February 2000. “Dad, when are you going to...” Spielberg, quoted at Director’s Guild of America, circa March 2000. “completely unconfirmed and graded as an 8...” is from Cinescape Online (www.cinescape.com), 15 February 2000. Page 100: “in the process...” is from ‘Arnold & Indy: They’ll Be Back’, uncredited, Variety, 22 June 2000. “There are a lot of things...” M. Night Shyamalan, quoted on MovieHeadlines.com, 29 November 2000. “I was never contacted...” Shyamalan, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 31 July 2001. “looking forward...” Ford, quoted on the Internet Movie Database, circa October 2000. Page 101: “but to be honest...” Kathleen Kennedy, quoted in interview with the Calgary Sun, February 2001. “We have a title...” Spielberg, quoted in interview with Roger Friedman for Fox News, 21 January 2002. Page 102: “Right now, Steven’s been described...” Marvin Levy, quoted in interview with E! Online, 22 January 2002. “We’re in the process of hiring...” Lucas, quoted in interview with Master P for MTV Movie House, 24 May 2002. “George called about a month...” Frank Darabont, quoted in Cinescape, June 2002. “It’s official that we have an ambition...” Ford, ibid. “wonderful” Spielberg, quoted in ‘Indy Scriptwriter Signed’, uncredited, Dreamwatch, June 2002. Page 103: “Steven, Harrison and I...” Lucas, quoted on www.starwars.com, 25 June 2002. “Indy’s pop will be back...” Spielberg, quoted in ‘Indy Doesn’t Get the Willies’, uncredited, Dreamwatch, January 2003. “I absolutely don’t want to do things...” Darabont, quoted in Alameda Times-Star Online, circa 2003. “huge cavern filled with...” is from ‘Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods’ screenplay by Frank Darabont, 4 April 2003. Page 104: “Death in a homburg hat”; “It appears.” “Perfectly formed...” “There are thirteen skulls...” “we are the ones...” ibid. “It was a terrible disappointment...” Darabont, quoted in ‘After “Waste Of A Year” On “Indy 4,” Director Rebounds With Stephen King’s “Mist”’ by Josh Horowitz, MTV.com, 17 April 2007. Page 106: “He put some really good...” “What I did later on...” Spielberg, quoted in the documentary ‘The Return of a Legend’ for the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull DVD, circa 2008. “I spent about a year on it...” David Koepp, ibid. “I feel like I dropped the ball...” Shia LaBeouf, quoted in ‘Cannes 2010: Shia LaBeouf: We botched the last Indiana Jones’ by Steven Zeitchik, LATimes.com, 15 May 2010. “I was the hold out....” Spielberg, quoted in ‘Indy Doesn’t Get the Willies’, uncredited, Dreamwatch, January 2003. “Steven didn’t like...” Lucas, quoted in ‘The Return of a Legend,’ ibid.

THE LOST CRUSADE

Page 107: “The story of the Crusades...” Verhoeven, quoted in interview with Neil Young posted on www.jigsawlounge.co.uk, 18 April 2002. Page 108: “We were sitting outside Arnold’s trailer...”; “Walon wrote a script...”; “We wanted to be honest...” Verhoeven, AI. Page 110: “to wed and bed the true love...” is from the unproduced script Crusades by Walon Green. Page 112: “It was always supposed to be a movie for Arnold...”; “There are touches of lightness...” Verhoeven, AI. “They came up with a draft or two...” and all other Gary Goldman quotes, AI. Page 113: “We presented it in the way of Total Recall...”; “If you see other movies about the Crusades...” Verhoeven, AI. Page 115: “the greatest unproduced script...” Damien Thorn, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (aintitcool.com). “Crusade doesn’t want to take a religious stand...” anonymous, ibid. Page 116: “I tested a lot of women...”; “I was too honest...”; Page 117: “Carolco went through a terrible...” Verhoeven, AI. “serious talks”; Page 118: “Long considered one of the best unproduced scripts...” is from ‘Schwarzenegger Wooing Milchan to Join Crusade’ by Michael Fleming, Daily Variety, 5 February 1999. “Even the word Crusade...” Verhoeven, quoted in DVD Monthly, circa 2001. “Of course, Bush not knowing what...” Verhoeven, AI. “We have to bring it up to date...” Schwarzenegger, quoted on Cinescape Online (www.cinescape.com), 9 November 2001. Page 119: “At its core, it harkens to what’s going on today...” is from ‘Now Showing: The Flag’ by Mike Medavoy, Washington Post, 6 February 2002. “In the end, you see the stupidity...” Walon Green, ibid. “The story of the Crusades...” Verhoeven, quoted in interview with Neil Young posted on Jigsaw Lounge (www.jigsawlounge.co.uk), 18 April 2002. “The Crusades, which began in the 11th century...” is from ‘Fox, Scott Plot Crusade’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 3 Mar 2002. p122 “It’s a movie I’ve been thinking about for twenty years...” Scott, quoted in The San Bernadino County Sun, circa September 2003. Page 120: “The subject has to be dealt with...” Scott, from a press conference for Matchstick Men, circa September 2003. “I think it’s a great script...” and all remaining Verhoeven quotes, AI.

TRAIN WRECK

Page 121: “It was sort of like...” and all other Steven de Souza quotes, AI. “It was a sci-fi action thriller...” and all other Jim Uhls quotes, AI. Page 122: “Sometime in 1988...” is from H. R. Giger’s Film Design by H. R. Giger, London: Titan Books, 1999. “I have come close...” Ridley Scott, ibid. “he told me to just...” ibid. “If somebody is telling me something...” H. R. Giger, AI. “Shortly thereafter he telephoned...” is from H. R. Giger’s Film Design by H. R. Giger, London: Titan Books, 1999. “I never got engaged and I never got paid...” and all remaining Giger quotes, AI. Page 123: “a mutant professional fighter...” and all other Jere Cunningham quotes, AI. “I had worked with Roland...” and all other Dean Devlin quotes, AI. “I met Roland and Dean...” and all other Tab Murphy quotes, AI.

WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?

Page 135: “I had lots of people calling me up...” and all other David Koepp quotes, AI. “Who else could have taken on the censors...” is from ‘Howard Hughes: Tales of a Priapic Producer’ by Peter Bart, Variety, 23 September 2001. Page 136: “the greatest night in show business...” Charles Chaplin, ibid. Page 137: “He had seen me in Return to October...” and all other Terry Moore quotes, AI. Page 138: “I was caught up in a rushing stream...” Clifford Irving, quoted in interview with Mr Showbiz, April 1999. “That’s a vast project...” Brian De Palma, quoted in ‘Brian De Palma’, uncredited, ET Online (etonline.com), 30 July 1998. Page 140: “Leo’s been phenomenal to work with...” John Logan, quoted on BBCi Films, uncredited, circa 1999. “Hughes was childlike in many ways...” Charles Higham, quoted in ‘Imagine: Leo as Howard Hughes’, uncredited, New York Post, 30 June 1999. “Leonardo has all of those qualities...” Michael Mann, quoted in ‘Who’s Hughes in H’wood’ by ‘Mr Showbiz,’ mr.showbiz.go.com, 24 October 1999. “Hughes’ formative years...” Michael De Luca, quoted in ‘New Line Spruced Up’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 25 February 2000. Page 141: “Much of what has been written about him...” Alan Ladd, Jr., quoted in ‘Howard Hughes Biopic’, uncredited, Variety, 23 March 2000. Page 142: “Ten years ago, we would have said...” Scott Alexander, quoted in ‘Hughes Intrigue Continues’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 13 January 2000. “As writers, the problem is...” Larry Karaszewski, ibid. “No one has worked harder to bring the story...” Pat Broeske, quoted in interview with Inside.com, February 2001. “As a result of these discussions...” and other details of the Evans lawsuit, ibid. “feature film or telefilm...” is from ‘Helmer Friedkin to take on Hack’s Hughes’ by Army Archerd, Variety, 6 September 2001. Page 143: “I’ve been fascinated by Hughes...” William Friedkin, ibid. Page 144: “It was the extreme nature of his story...” Christopher Nolan, quoted in interview with S.F. Chronicle, reported on www.christophernolan.net, 17 May 2002. “It’s about the extremes to which one man can live...” Nolan, quoted in ‘Nolan on Hughes Project’ by ‘Lenny,’ www.christophernolan.net, 2 June 2002. Page 144: “It is the sort of great unmade Hollywood movie...” Nolan, quoted in ‘Wide Awake & Living in a Dream’ by Rob Blackwelder, Spliced Wire (www.splicedwire.com), circa 2002. “Jim was born to play Hughes....” Nolan, quoted in ‘Chris and Carrey Tackle Legendary Howard Hughes’, uncredited, The Calgary Sun, 24 April 2002. “Hughes is like everyone else...” Jim Carrey, quoted in ‘Hughes Grant’ by Liana Bonin, Entertainment Weekly, circa 2002. “Mann apparently agreed to step aside...” is from ‘Helmers Ganging up on Hughes’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 24 January 2002. “I was never, like so many others...” Martin Scorsese, quoted in Variety report by Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith, circa February 2003. Page 145: “There’s no sense of any kind of race...” Nolan, quoted in ‘Howard Hughes Biopic Update’, uncredited, The Z Review (www.thezreview.co.uk), 29 August 2002.

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

Page 147: “The Sandman movie has nothing to do with me...” Neil Gaiman, quoted in Cinescape, 16 August 1999. Page 148: “Looking back, the process of coming up...” Gaiman, from the afterword to The Sandman: Preuludes & Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman et al., New York: DC Comics, 1991. “to read The Sandman is to read something more...” Mikal Gilmore, quoted on dustjacket for The Sandman: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman et al., New York: DC Comics, 1995. “To make it film-shaped...” Gaiman, quoted in The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender, New York: Vertigo Books, 1999. Page 149: “After turning in a draft that we felt...” Ted Elliott, quoted on Coming Attractions (corona.bc.ca), circa May 1998. “Since its inception, Terry and I...” and all other Elliott quotes are from Word Play (www.wordplayer.com). Page 150: “[Elliott and Rossio] had been paid a king’s ransom...” and all other Roger Avary quotes are from Avary.com (www.avary.com) Page 151: “one of the best I’ve read in quite some time...” ‘Widget’, quoted on Coming Attractions (corona.bc.ca). “I watched Sandman, my great epic comics opus...” Gaiman, quoted in the BBC Radio production Development Hell, produced by Neil Rosser, 2011. Page 154: “I read the graphic novel...”; “Basically, it was clear from the start...”; “The reply was basically...” William Farmer, AI. Page 155: “Where The Sandman movie is concerned...” Gaiman, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com) circa 1998. “When all was said and done...” Farmer, AI. “Mistake number one...”; “Rose Kendall is the daughter...” ‘Moriarty’, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com) Page 156: “The horrible line...” Farmer, quoted on Comics 2 Film (www.comics2film.com). “Well, of course the hospital...”; Page 157: “Gaiman never, ever cheated us...”; ‘Moriarty’, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com). “the worst one yet...” Gaiman, quoted in interview with the Philadelphia City Paper (www.citypaper.net). “not only the worst Sandman script...” Gaiman, quoted in interview with Andy Mangels, reported on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com). “Films carry with them...” “It was very obvious...” Gaiman, quoted in ‘Development Hell’, ibid. Page 158: “If any of you are waiting for Mr Gaiman’s...” Farmer, quoted on Coming Attractions (corona.bc.ca). “mixed feelings” and all other Farmer quotes, AI. Page 159: “I think right now they’re licking...” Gaiman, quoted in interview with Andy Mangels, reported on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com). “They always have ideas for casting...” Gaiman, quoted in interview with Cold Print (www.cold-print.com). Page 160: “I was approached by Brian Manis...” and all other David J. Schow quotes, AI. Page 162: “I couldn’t quite see why they got him...” Gaiman, AI. “for another [version of the] movie...” Gaiman, quoted on Universo HQ (www.universohq.com) “the strange, sad, development hell...” Gaiman, AI. “I just desperately hope that it’s a good movie...” Gaiman, quoted in interview with Cold Print (www.cold-print.com). “My own hope is that some time in my lifetime...” Gaiman, AI. Page 163: “My assumption...” and all other Gaiman quotes are from ‘Development Hell’, ibid.

CRISIS ON THE HOT ZONE

Page 165: “We had Redford, Ridley Scott...” and all other Richard Friedenberg quotes, AI. “He mentioned Ebola...” Richard Preston, quoted in ‘Crisis in the Plot Zone’ by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Entertainment Weekly, 24 March 1995. Page 166: “I want people to know...” and all other Arnold Kopelson quotes are ibid. Page 167: “Fox and I had won...” and all other Lynda Obst quotes are from Hello, He Lied by Lynda Obst, New York: Little Brown, 1996. Page 168: “I had just finished Contact...” and all other James V. Hart quotes, AI. Page 172: “I got the scripts on my desk the same day...” Wolfgang Petersen, quoted in ‘Crisis in the Plot Zone’ by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Entertainment Weekly, 24 March 1995. Page 173: “an eleventh-hour, page-one...” and all other Tom Topor quotes, AI. Page 180: “It was like a train wreck...”; “When the Fox project exploded...” Preston, quoted in ‘Film Clipped’ by Richard Corliss, TIME, 5 September 1994. Page 182: “extreme creative conflicts...”; “an old poker buddy”; “every draft by every writer”; “Ted Tally contributed...” Robert Roy Pool, quoted in ‘Crisis in the Plot Zone’ by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Entertainment Weekly, 24 March 1995. “I’m just sitting there laughing...” Preston, ibid. Page 183: “ripped off” and all other Pool quotes are from a letter printed as part of ‘Inside Outbreak Fever’, uncredited, Entertainment Weekly, 21 April 1995. Page 184: “It’s a great script...” Scott McGehee, quoted in Variety, 2 July 2002. Page 185: “watching people break and enter...” Preston, quoted in “Crisis in the Plot Zone” by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Entertainment Weekly, 24 March 1995. Page 186: “I would have loved to work with Jodie...” Ridley Scott, quoted in Ridley Scott: The Making of his Movies by Paul M. Sammon, London: Orion, 1999. “It’s not like Alien...” Preston, quoted in ‘Film Clipped’ by Richard Corliss, TIME, 5 September 1994.

FALL AND RISE OF THE DARK KNIGHT

Page 187: “I told them I’d cast...” and all other Darren Aronofsky quotes, AI. “I remember when I was...”; “Batman and Robin were always punning...” Bob Kane, quoted in ‘Bob Kane, 83, Cartoonist Who Created Batman’, The New York Times, 7 November 1998. Page 188: “a definitive Batman movie...” Michael E. Uslan, quoted in ‘Batman’ by Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, November 1989. “The first treatment...” Tim Burton, quoted in Burton on Burton edited by Mark Salisbury, revised edition, London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Page 189: “The success of the graphic novel...” Burton, quoted in ‘Batman’ by Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, November 1989. “I tried to take the premise...” Sam Hamm, quoted in ‘Batman’ by Taylor H. White, Cinefantastique, June 1989. “In my mind I kept...” Burton, quoted in Burton on Burton edited by Mark Salisbury, revised edition, London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Page 190: “I see what they’re doing...” Hamm, quoted in ‘Batman’ by Taylor H. White, Cinefantastique, June 1989. Page 190: “When I was hired...” and all other Wesley Strick quotes, AI. Page 192: “The Joker is coming...” Jack Nicholson, quoted in various sources from As Good As It Gets press conference, circa 1997. “He’s not Batman...” Jon Peters, quoted in interview with Beth Laski, Cinescape Online, 9 October 1998. “If there is another, I’d do it...” George Clooney, quoted in interview with E! News Daily, 19 September 1997. “I felt I had disappointed...” Joel Schumacher, quoted in Variety, 9 January 1998. Page 193: “If your only memory...” is from the introduction to Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, New York: DC Comics, 1990. Page 197: “It’ll have to be dark...” Keanu Reeves, quoted in interview with TV Times and reported on Empire Online, 1 October 1999. “pure fiction...” Ben Affleck, quoted in Comics 2 Film (www.comics2film.com ), 29 December 1999. Page 197: “I know that it’s one of the possible options...” Paul Dini, quoted in interview with Cinescape Online (www.cinescape.com) by Patrick Sauriol, 5 November 1999. “Boaz is co-writing the script...” Dini, quoted in interview with Comics Continuum (www.comicscontinuum.com), circa 2000. Page 198: “You do the movie cheap...” Clooney, quoted on the Internet Movie Database, 8 September 2000. “unless we put Batman and Superman...” Peters, quoted in interview with Beth Laski, Cinescape Online, 9 October 1998. Page 199: “I very much liked Walker’s original...” ‘Jett’, quoted on Batman on Film (www.batman-on-film.com), reported on Coming Attractions (www.corona.bc.ca), 26 January 2003. “It is the clash of the titans...” Wolfgang Petersen, quoted in ‘WB Finds Helmer for Batman vs Superman’ by Dana Harris, Daily Variety, 8 July 2002. Page 200: “We have a script...” Petersen, quoted on MTV.com circa 2002. “No, that’s Bateman...” Christian Bale, quoted in an interview with Movie Hole (www.moviehole.net), 15 August 2002. “I did, and it was amazing...” Peters, quoted in ‘In This Superman Story, the Executives Do the Fighting’ by Laura M. Holson, The New York Times, 15 September 2002. Page 201: “In reintroducing...”; “I wanted some objectivity...” Alan Horn, ibid. “a Batman origins movie...” Horn, quoted in The Hollywood Reporter, circa December 2002. “He told me that his original idea...” Christopher Reeve, quoted on Comicon.com, 20 January 2003. “I swear I heard the flapping...” Peters, quoted in ‘In This Superman Story, the Executives Do the Fighting’ by Laura M Holson, New York Times, 15 September 2002. Page 202: “My own movie agent...” quoted in Supergods by Grant Morrison, London: Jonathan Cape, 2011. “All I can say is that...” Christopher Nolan, quoted in ‘Batman Captures Director Nolan’ by Michael Fleming, Variety, 27 January 2003. “I said, ‘If I do this...’” David Goyer, quoted in ‘Batman – The Journey Begins,’ a documentary for the Batman Begins DVD, circa 2005.

TOMB RAIDER CHRONICLES

Page 205: “We should have made a better movie...” Lloyd Levin, quoted in ‘Angelina Jolie is One Tough Mother’ by Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly, 18 July 2003. Page 207: “Mr Lawrence Gordon and Mr Lloyd Levin...” is from a press release announcing the Tomb Raider film, circa 1998. “We are thrilled by the possibilities...” John Goldwyn, ibid. Page 209: “I’m sorry to report that the content...”; “it seems like a mix of Predator-style chase set-pieces...” are from ‘Tomb Raider Script Review’ by ‘Agent 4125’, Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com), 1 October 1998. Page 211: “I’d love to give you the whole story...” Brent V. Friedman, quoted in ‘Tomb with a View’ by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. “I was hired in September 1998...” and all other Steven de Souza quotes, AI. Page 212: “Several scribes took a shot...” is from ‘Herek Digs Par’s Tomb’, uncredited, Variety, 11 April 1999. “Thankfully, de Souza’s Tomb Raider...”; “Overall, this is an excellent script...” ‘Necros,’ quoted on Coming Attractions (www.corona.bc.ca). “We hadn’t gotte...” Levin, quoted in ‘Tomb with a View’ by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. Page 213: “[The producers] said, ‘The situation is this...” John Zinman, quoted in ‘Tomb Raider’ by David Goldsmith, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “Scene for scene, beat for beat...”; Page 214: “a lot of puzzle solving...” Patrick Massett, ibid. “The challenge is to create a story...” Zinman, ibid. “hailed as heroes” Zinman, quoted in “Tomb with a View” by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. “The script opens in Macedonia...”; “a wonderful contradiction...”; “You’re not asking much...” Darwin Mayflower, quoted on Screenwriters Utopia (www.screenwritersutopia.com). Page 216: “The old drafts had a lot of Mary Poppins...”; “Every time it came up I thought...” Simon West, quoted in ‘Tomb with a View’ by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. Page 217: “[One of them] had scenes with people visiting the Queen...” West, quoted in Dreamwatch, circa 2001. “The plot, briefly, involves adventuress/magazine editor...” is from a report on Coming Attractions (www.corona.bc.ca) Page 218: “From a creative point of view...” Levin, quoted in ‘Tomb with a View’ by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. “When we met with Simon his idea was...” Zinman, quoted in ‘Tomb Raider’ by David Goldsmith, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. Page 219: “James Bond of archaeology...” West, quoted in Entertainment Weekly, 2 March 2000. “It was always Angelina...” West, quoted in ‘Not Just a Pretty Face... Balls of Brass Too’ by Mark Dinning Empire, August 2001. Page 220: “At first I thought Tomb Raider was a really bad idea...”; “It’s taken us a long time to figure out...” Angelina Jolie, ibid. “It was always our intention for Lara...” Massett, quoted in ‘Tomb Raider’ by David Goldsmith, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “This script is first and foremost about Lara...”; “nimble wit...”; “I was surprised by how much...”; “The choices faced...” ‘Moriarty’, quoted on Ain’t It Cool News (www.aintitcool.com). Page 221: “Originally, I wrote the idea to be in China...” West, quoted in interview for Paramount press materials for Lara Croft Tomb Raider. Page 222: “We wrote a script that was just huge...” Zinman, quoted in ‘Tomb Raider’ by David Goldsmith, Creative Screenwriting, July/August 2001. “Long, long ago, a meteor crashed to Earth...”; “The High Priest knew that this power...” is dialogue cut from Lara Croft Tomb Raider. Page 223: “Burglars escaped with a rucksack...” is from a report in The Sunday Express, 8 October 2000. “I was in bed at home...” West, quoted ibid. Page 224: “psychologist specialising in stress management” reported in ‘Tomb with a View’ by Christine Spines, Premiere, July 2001. “I’ve learned that” West, quoted in ibid. “The only way I could write so much music...” Graeme Revell, quoted in Dreamwatch, June 2001. Page 225: “The first one did not have a strong story...” Levin, quoted in ‘Angelina Jolie is One Tough Mother’ by Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly, 18 July 2003. Page 227: “The only thing that we can attribute it to...” Wayne Lewellen, quoted in ‘Lara Plays the Blame Game’, uncredited, Dreamwatch. October 2003. “If Paramount had spent a few bucks...” is from ‘Summer Winners and Losers’ by various, Entertainment Weekly, circa September 2003. “Mark and Hawk’s sensibilities...” Graham King, quoted in a press release dated 5 May 2011. “We are thrilled...” Fergus and Ostby, ibid.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FILM

Page 229: “Jim called me up...” Roland Emmerich, quoted in ‘Emmerich On Fantastic Voyage’, uncredited, EmpireOnline.com, 25 September 2007. Page 230: “I followed the plot line...” quoted in I, Asimov by Isaac Asimov, New York: Doubleday, 1994. “involved two vessels”; Page 231: “wrote a novel” ibid. “A motion picture may...” quoted in the introduction to Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain by Isaac Asimov, New York: Doubleday, 1987. “When I was a kid...” and all other Dean Devlin quotes, AI. Page 232: “Dean Devlin asked us...” and all other Glen Morgan quotes, AI. Page 233: “The molecular construction...” is from the Fantastic Voyage screenplay dated 12 June 1997. Page 235: “My draft was well received...” and all other Tab Murphy quotes, AI. Page 236: “I remembered the film...” and all other Kevin J. Anderson quotes, AI. “I was attached to this project...”; Page 237: “I said, ‘Why have you...’” Emmerich, quoted in ‘Emmerich On Fantastic Voyage’, uncredited, EmpireOnline.com, 25 September 2007. “We’ve been working on a script...” James Cameron, quoted in ‘James Cameron on Avatar Sequels, Fantastic Voyage and Battle Angel’ by Steve ‘Frosty’ Weintraub, Collider.com, 11 December 2009.

TALES FROM THE SCRIPT

Page 245: “Paul’s version was very cerebral...” Jim Robinson, quoted in ‘Exorcise Plan’ by Missy Schwartz, Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Double ’05. All other quotes recalled from bitter, bitter experience.

INDEX OF PEOPLE & PROJECTS

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E
F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J
K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O
P  |  R  |  S  |  T  |  U
V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

A

Abrams, J.J. 200-201

Ackerman, Forrest J. 50-52

Adams, Douglas 9

Affleck, Ben 197

After the Gods
242

Airborne
239, 248-250, 252-253

Alexander, Scott 142

Allen, Karen 103

Anderson, Kevin J. 236

Angelou, Maya 180

Aronofsky, Darren 187, 193-196, 198, 240, 248

Asimov, Isaac 230-231, 233, 236

Attanasio, Paul 177-179, 218

Avary, Roger 150-154, 159-160, 162

Aviator, The
11, 135, 144, 145

B

Babyak, Beth 244, 247

Baird, Stuart 224

Baker, Rick 36, 44, 127

Bakshi, Ralph 57-59

Bale, Christian 200

Balk, Fairuza 160

Basile, Pier Luigi 65

Basinger, Kim 126, 190

Batchler, Janet Scott 15-29

Batchler, Lee 15-29

Batman
11, 187-190, 199, 203

Batman & Robin
191-192, 203

Batman Begins
202 (footnote)

Batman Beyond, aka Batman of the Future
197-198

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
197

Batman 5
191-192

Batman Forever
191

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
197

Batman Returns
190-191

Batman: The Animated Series
197

Batman vs Superman
198-202

Batman: Year One
193, 198, 200-202

Batman: Year Zero
202

Baumgarten, Craig 35-37

Bay, Michael 42

Beagle, Peter S. 58

Beatty, Warren 137, 142

Belushi, James 126

Berdinka, Jesse 77, 81, 84

Beresford, Bruce 66-67, 71

Berman, Bruce 19, 21

Bernal, Bill 52

Bigel, Daniel 242, 244

Bixby, Jerome aka Jay Lewis Bixby 230

Boam, Jeffrey 90-91, 94, 96-97

Bonham Carter, Helena 46

Boorman, John 49, 54-57, 60

Boulle, Pierre 31-34, 41

Braga, Brannon 218

Brassel, Bob 200

Brodie, Kevin 25-26

Brolin, James 32

Broyles Jr., William 42-44, 46

Bruckheimer, Jerry 118

Bullock, Sandra 89-90

Burnett, Alan 197

Burton, Tim 11, 31, 35, 43-46, 188-190, 196, 198, 203

C

Cage, Nicolas 138-140, 142

Cameron, James 41-42, 229, 236-238

Capshaw, Kate 101, 103, 105 (footnote)

Carrey, Jim 144

Catwoman
201-202

Chambers, John 32-33

Channing-Williams, Simon 206

Charno, Sara B. See Sara B. Cooper

Chernin, Peter 40, 182

Cirulnick, Matt 76-77, 81-85

Climan, Sandy 143

Clooney, George 191-192, 198

Cobb, Ron 50

Colleary, Michael 214-215, 218, 22
3

Columbus, Chris 41, 93-94

Conkling, Chris 58

Connelly, Jennifer 116

Connery, Sean 20-21, 101, 103

Contagion,
186

Coolis, Orin 149

Cooper, Sara B. 211, 223

Costner, Kevin 93

Creber, William 33

Crisis in the Hot Zone, See The Hot Zone

Cronenberg, David 61, 63-66

Crowley, Nathan 203

Cruise, Tom 75

Crusade
11, 74, 107-120

Cunningham, Jere 123

D

Dante, Joe 188

Darabont, Frank 96, 102-106

Dark Knight, The
203

Dark Knight Rises, The
203

Davis, John 123

Day-Lewis, Daniel 160

Dead Reckoning See ISOBAR

de Bont, Jan 74-75, 225

Deitch, Gene 52-53

De Laurentiis, Dino 63, 65-67

De Luca, Michael 141

De Palma, Brian 135, 138-140

Depp, Johnny 137, 140, 143, 145

de Souza, Steven 121, 124-131, 211-214, 216-220, 223-226

Devlin, Dean 124, 130-133, 231-236

di Bonaventura, Lorenzo 149-150, 153, 196, 200-202

DiCaprio, Leonardo 140-145

Dick, Philip K. 61-64, 66, 69-74, 86

Dini, Paul 197

Dixon, Leslie 27-28

Douglas, Joel, 25-27

Douglas, Kirk 25

Douglas, Michael 25-29

Downey Jr., Robert 239, 242-243

Dreyfuss, Richard 64

Duncan, David 230

Dworet, Laurence 166-167, 180, 182-184

E

Edelmann, Heinz 54

Edwards, Blake 32

Ego Makers, The
242-243

Elfman, Danny 36

Elliot, Denholm 93

Elliott, Ted 148-153, 161

Emmerich, Roland 42, 124, 130, 132, 229, 231, 234, 235-237

Evans Jr., Charles 142-143

Evans, Maurice 34

Exorcist, The
246-247

Exorcist: The Beginning
239, 244, 247

Exorcist III
246

Exorcist II: The Heretic
246

F

Fain, Brett 21-22, 24

Fantastic Voyage
11

Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm
236

Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain
231

Fantastic Voyage
229-238

Farmer, Philip José 231

Farmer, William 153-159, 162

Fasano, John 21

Fergus, Mark 227

Ferretti, Dante 128

Fincher, David 142

Fincher, Jack 143

Finger, Bill 187

Fisher, Carrie 180

Fleischer, Richard 230

Florence, Bill 64

Ford, Harrison 89-94, 97-102, 106

Forman, Milos 135, 142

Foster, Jodie 172, 175-178, 186

Frakes, Jonathan 80

Frank, Scott 47

Friedenberg, Richard 10, 165, 173-174, 177, 179, 181, 186

Friedkin, William 143

Friedman, Brent V. 207, 209-211

Frye, Steven 97

G

Gaghan, Stephen 101

Gaiman, Neil 147-163

Gale, Bob 77

Gard, Toby 206, 227

Gasmer, Alan 18-19

Georgaris, Dean 169, 225-226

Gere, Richard 145

Giger, H.R. 122-123

Girard, Francois 28

Goff, Harper 230

Goldman, Bo 137

Goldman, Gary 10, 67-82, 85, 112-117, 119

Goldsman, Akiva 198-199

Goldwyn, John 207, 212

Gordon, Lawrence 123, 207, 211, 213, 218, 225-226

Gordon, Mark 137, 144

Goyer, David S. 202-203

Granat, Cary 77

Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, The
9, 11

Green, Walon 108-109, 111-114, 117

Greengrass, Paul 237, 248-250

Guber, Peter 188

H

Hallström, Lasse 145

Hamm, Sam 41, 189-190

Hamsher, Jane 9, 37-41

Harlin, Renny 245, 247

Harris, Lynn 169

Harrison, George 54

Harrison, Linda 32

Hart, James V. 168-174, 176-179, 181-182, 184-186, 225, 251

Hayes, Terry 39-41, 137

Hell-Fire
248

Hell Fire Club
248

Hennessy, Dale 230

Henning, Ted 15, 21-23, 25-26

Herek, Stephen 211-213, 216

Heston, Charlton 32, 34, 36, 44-45

High Rise, See The Ego Makers

Hobbit, The
49, 52-53

Horn, Alan 201-202

Hot Zone, The
11, 165-186, 248, 251

Hughes, Albert 42, 137

Hughes, Allen 42, 137

Hughes, Howard 135-145

Hurt, William 64

Husky, Rick 253

I

Illusionist, The
29

Indiana Jones 11, 87-106

Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods 103

Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life
93

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
87, 106

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
87-90, 102, 104

Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent
90, 94

Indiana Jones and the Monkey King
93

Indiana Jones and the Red Scare
98

Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars
94-96, 98

Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness
91, 97

Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur
96-97, 100

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
89, 101, 105 (footnote)

Indiana Jones and the Tomb of Ice
100

Indiana Jones: The Law of One
94

Inhuman Remains
251-252

Irving, Clifford 137-139, 145

ISOBAR
11, 121-133

ISOBAR Run, The See ISOBAR

J

Jackson, Peter 42, 49, 51-52, 56, 59, 60

Jacobs, Arthur P. 31-34

Jacobson, Tom 38, 41, 168-169, 173-174

Jaffa, Rick 46, 47, 168

Jendresen, Erik 184-185

Jeter, Michael 126

Jimenez, Neal 172, 180, 182

Jolie, Angelina 211, 212, 218-220, 224, 225

Jones, David 25-26

K

Kalogridis, Laeta 218, 221

Kane, Bob 187-188

Kang, Peter 47

Karaszewski, Larry 142

Kasdan, Lawrence 88

Kassar, Mario 67, 70-71, 73, 85, 109, 121, 124, 126, 129

Katz, Gail 182

Katzenberg, Jeffrey 18

Kaufman, Philip 88

Keaton, Michael 189-190

Kennedy, Kathleen 20, 101-102

King, Graham 143, 227

Klein, Bobby 224

Kleiner, Harry 230

Klement, Otto 230

Knowles, Harry 93

Koepp, David 106, 135, 138-140, 145

Kon, Satoshi 240

Konner, Larry 44

Kopelson, Arnold 166, 167, 180, 182-183, 185

L

LaBoeuf, Shia 106

Ladd Jr., Alan 141-142

Landau, Jon 236

Lansing, Sherry 181

Lara Croft Tomb Raider
225, 227

Lara Croft Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life
227

Leder, Mimi 28

Lennon, John 53-54

Levin, Lloyd 205, 207, 212, 218, 225-226

Levine, Tom 19

Levy, Marvin 101-102

Levy, Shawn 238

Lewellen, Wayne 227

Logan, John 140-141, 144

London, Michael 168, 173

Lord of the Rings, The
11, 49-60

Loren, Sophia 126

Lucas, George 87-106

Ludwig, Tony 149, 154

M

Maddock, Brent 253

Magician’s Wife, The
28

Mailer, Michael 242

Mancuso Jr., Frank 241

Manis, Brian 160

Mankiewicz, Tom 188

Mann, Michael 140-143

Marshall, Alan 116

Marshall, Frank 20-21

Massett, Patrick 213-214, 218, 220-221, 223

Mathison, Melissa 28

McCallum, Rick 94, 97-99

McCartney, Paul 54, 56

McConaughey, Matthew 239, 242

McGehee, Scott 184

McKeown, Charles 190

McQueeney, Patricia 99

McTiernan, John 26-27

Medavoy, Mike 58, 118

Melnick, Dan 58

Melniker, Benjamin 188

Mestres, Ricardo 18, 19

Milchan, Arnon 117

Miller, Frank 188, 193-196

Miller, Ron 65

Milius, John 29

Minority Report
73, 86

Moore, Alan 148

Moore, Terry 136, 141-142

Moore, Vince 86

Morgan, Glen 232-235, 237-238

Moritz, Neil 244, 250

Morrison, Grant 148, 202

Mr Hughes
139-140, 145

Murphy, Don 31, 37-42, 45

Murphy, Tab 130-132, 235, 238

N

Nathanson, Jeff 106

Nicholson, Jack 189, 190-191

Nolan, Christopher 135, 143-145, 202-203

Norton, Edward 142-143

Nothing to Declare
242-243

Noyce, Phillip 40

Nye, Ben 33

O

O’Bannon, Dan 62-64, 68

Obst, Lynda 167-169, 173-175, 177-180, 184-185

Ostby, Hawk 227

Outbreak
165, 168-169, 172, 175-176, 180-182, 184, 186, 248-249, 252

P

Pallenberg, Rospo 55-57

Pandora
167

Parker, Hutch 47

Perfect Blue
240

Peters, Jon 149-150, 152-155, 157, 162-163, 192, 198, 200-201

Petersen, Wolfgang 19, 172, 180, 183-184, 199-200

Planet of the Apes
11, 31-48

Polk, Mimi 173-174

Pool, Robert Roy 166-167, 180-184

Povill, Jon 68

Prentice, Michael 97

Pressfield, Steven 68

Prestige, The
29

Preston, Richard 165-167, 169, 171-178, 180-181, 183-186, 248

Protosevich, Mark 192

R

Raiders of the Fallen Empire
93

Raiders of the Lost Ark aka Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
88-89, 93, 98, 100, 103-104

Raimi, Sam 37

Redford, Robert 173-174, 176-177, 179-181

Reeves, Keanu 197

Reitman, Ivan 188

Return of the Apes See Planet of the Apes

Revelations
241

Revell, Graeme 224-225

Rice, Peter 37-38, 234

Riche, Alan 149, 154

Rifkin, Adam 35-37, 45

Ringwood, Bob 65

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
47-48

Robards, Jason 137

Robinson, Dana 224

Robinson, Edward G. 32

Robinson, Jim 245, 247

Rona, Andrew 77, 81, 84-85

Rosenthal, Mark 44

Rossio, Terry 148-153, 161

Roth, Tim 46

Rothman, Tom 41, 43

Rush, Richard 63, 66

S

Sandman, The
11, 55, 147-163

Schaffner, Franklin J. 32-34

Schnabel, Marco 132

Schölermann, Marc 244

Schow, David J. 160-162

Schrader, Paul 245-247

Schumacher, Joel 191-193, 203

Schwarzenegger, Arnold 40-42, 61, 64, 66-68, 71, 73-74, 77, 79, 80-81, 83-86, 107-109, 111-113, 115-120, 123

Scorsese, Martin 144

Scott, Ridley 119, 121-123, 165, 172-176, 179-181, 186

Sellers, Dylan 40

Serling, Rod 32-33

Sewell, Rufus 160

Shanley, John Patrick 21

Shatner, William 252, 254

Shusett, Ronald D. 61-65, 67-69, 71-74, 75, 77-79, 81-82, 85-86

Shyamalan, M. Night 99-100

Sibley, Bryan 51

Siegel, David 184

Silver, Amanda 46-48, 168

Silver, Joel 121, 123-124

Skaaren, Warren 190

Smith, Jack Martin 230

Smith, Robert 91-92

Smoke & Mirrors
11, 15-29

Smoke and Mirrors, see Smoke & Mirrors

Snyder, Bill 52-53

Soeteman, Gerard 108-109

Spacey, Kevin 142

Spielberg, Steven 75, 87-106

Stallone, Sylvester 124-127, 129, 133

Starr, Ringo 54

Stern, Jay 18

Stewart, Douglas Ray 21

Stigmata
240-241

Stone, Oliver 38-41

Stone, Sharon 66, 73, 78, 80-81

Stoppard, Tom 102

Streep, Meryl 179

Strick, Wesley 190-191

Stuart, Jeb 90, 95, 180, 182

Superman
188-189

Svankmajer, Jan 152-153

Swayze, Patrick 66-67

T

Tally, Ted 167, 182

Teague, Lewis 63

Thewlis, David 160

T.J. Hooker: The Movie
2
39, 252-254

Tolkien, J.R.R. 49-59

Tomb Raider
11, 205-228

Topor, Tom 173, 176, 179-181

Total Recall
11, 61-86

Total Recall 2
73-86

Total Recall 2070
75

Train, The
123

250 GTO
243-245

U

Uhls, Jim 121-124, 128

Uslan, Michael E. 188

V

Vajna, Andrew G. 18-20, 24-25, 29, 67, 70-71, 73, 85, 109, 121, 129

Vance, Marilyn 128

Vengeance from the Deep
248

Venville, Malcolm 242

Verhoeven, Paul 66-74, 76, 107-109, 111-119

Visitor, The See Planet of the Apes

Voight, Jon 220, 222

W

Wachowski, Andy 196

Wachowski, Larry 196

Wainwright, Rupert 240, 241

Walker, Andrew Kevin 198, 199

Warren, Estella 45

Weg, Howard 76

Weinstein, Bob 76-77, 80, 84-85

Weinstein, Harvey 78

Werb, Mike 214-215, 218, 223

West, Simon 216-219, 221-225

Wheaton, Wil 160

Wheeler, William 139

Wibberley, Cormac 237

Wibberley, Marianne 237

Wilson, Michael 33

Wilson, S.S. 253

Winston, Stan 42

Wong, James 232-235, 237-238

Wyatt, Rupert 47

Y

Yakin, Boaz 197-198

Yari, Bob 242

Yorn, Rick 143

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The
89, 102

Young, Sean 190

Z

Zaentz, Saul 58-59

Zanuck, Richard D. 32, 35, 43

Zeta-Jones, Catherine 25-27, 29

Zimmerman, Morton Grady 50-51

Zinman, John 213-214, 218, 220-223

Table of Contents

- INTRODUCTION
- 1 DISILLUSIONED
- 2 MONKEY BUSINESS
- 3 CAST INTO MOUNT DOOM
- 4 WE CAN REWRITE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
- 5 KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES
- 6 THE LOST CRUSADE
- 7 TRAIN WRECK
- 8 WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?
- 9 PERCHANCE TO DREAM
- 10 CRISIS ON THE HOT ZONE
- 11 FALL AND RISE OF THE DARK KNIGHT
- 12 TOMB RAIDER CHRONICLES
- 13 THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FILM
- 14 TALES FROM THE SCRIPT
- INDEX OF QUOTATIONS
- INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PROJECTS
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- Page 10
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 23
- Page 26
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