David Hughes' new book Tales From Development Hell looks at films that were never made, and ended up nestling into the cracks of Hollywood's scariest location, development hell. A place where movies go to die and usually never see the light of day.
In the book David provides an incredibly thorough account of how some of Hollywood's most famous projects that never were went from a simple idea, to a script, to having directors and even directors attached, but still no matter what ended up on the scrapheap.
The following article is made up of excerpts of excerpts that were distributed to sites. Links are provided so that you can view excerpts in full if you like, and I suggest you do.
After reading over the material I'd like you to vote for the films most and least deserving of development hell.
Neil Gaiman's Sandman
In 1987 Neil Gaiman took on the task of taking a rather unknown DC character,
The Sandman, and breathing new life into him. He not only took on the challenge successfully, but raised the bar completely. Neil Gaiman's
The Sandman hit the comic book stores in December of 1988 and was immediately showered with critical acclaim and commercial success. The comic would go on to win many awards, the prestigious Eisner and the Harvey. It would also in 1991 become the first comic in history to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story based on issue nineteen. An issue that drew upon Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' as inspiration.
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.
Screenplay adaptation by Roger Avary (Shrek), Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio (Aladdin).
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.
Neil Gaiman - "I watched Sandman, my great epic comics opus, go through traditional development hell 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."
To read the full excerpt go to USA Today
Batman vs Superman
Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow) and Akiva Goldsman (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, A Beautiful Mind)
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 pretense 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.
To read the full excerpt go to Movieline.com
Batman: Year One
Darren Aronofsky & Frank Miller
“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.
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 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.
To read the full excerpt go to Slashfilm.com
Darabont's Indiana Jones
Much of the beginning of the fourth film is in Darabont's script. There are a few differences, the most notable is that Indy's friend that betrays him is a Russian named Yuri, not the Brit named Mac, like in the film. And I know you're wondering about the refrigerator scene. Yes, that is in the Darabont script, and perhaps he is the one that came up with that jump the shark element. Regardless, whomever came up with that idea needs a good slap in the head. We'll start the excerpt after he is accused of selling secrets to the Russians and is back at school learning that he is being placed on a leave of absence.
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.
To read the full excerpt go to Filmschoolrejects.com
I understand a fourth Indiana Jones film was created, but try to forget that it was for the sake of the poll.