Tales From Development Hell Read online

  TALES FROM DEVELOPMENT HELL

  ISBN: 9780857687234

  E-BOOK ISBN 9780857687319

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

  144 Southwark St.

  London

  SE1 0UP

  First updated and expanded edition: February 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  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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  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the USA.

  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:

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

  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.”

  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.”

  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...

  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.