Ever wondered why so much drivel ends up on our cinema screens each year, while many thrilling stories can't even make it into production? David O'Mahonyinvestigates
'HOW did that ever get made," is a question muttered nightly by disappointed film-goers as they shuffle, furrow-browed, out of theatres. The sheer volume of celluloid dross clogging up the nation's movie theatres compels one to wonder if there are any ideas left in the Dream Factory.
The answer is yes, there are - bucketloads. However, some of the best ones often never make it to full term, and instead are lost to creative disputes, or financial and legal wranglings. "Development Hell" is the phrase used to describe that notional arena where films in various stages of thwarted production languish.
Recent escapees from this creative purgatory would include Superman Returns, linked to Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage for much of the 1990s; I Am Legend, the adaptation of Richard Matheson's seminal vampire novel which Ridley Scott planned to direct after Blade Runner, was released last month with Francis Lawrence (who directed Constantine) behind the camera and Will Smith in front; and Alien v Predator, which perhaps ought to have remained half-formed.
The annals of Hollywood are pock-marked with high-profile projects that came to nought, many of which were suffocated by the love of over-zealous auteurs; consider Stanley Kubrick's failed biopic of Napoleon, for which the notoriously exacting director compiled an exhaustive archive of the conqueror's daily activities that beggars belief. In other instances, mortality is to blame, as when the great David Lean succumbed to age and infirmity during his attempts to adapt Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.
Marty's men
Perhaps the most enticing of the current non-productions is Martin Scorsese's proposed Dean Martin biopic; on indefinite hiatus until the director's "dream cast" of John Travolta as Sinatra, Tom Hanks as Martin, Jim Carrey as Jerry Lewis, Hugh Grant as Peter Lawford and Adam Sandler as Joey Bishop comes into alignment, the picture seems destined to collapse under the weight of its creator's expectations.
Jordan's Borgias
And then there is Neil Jordan's planned film of Italy's notorious Borgias family, which seems to have been his next film for the past 10 years. The director has, however, come closer than most to actually getting something in the can; a version starring Ewan McGregor and Christina Ricci fell apart in 2002 due to - you're ahead of me - financing difficulties.
Undeterred, the director recast the film in 2005, this time with Scarlett Johansson and Colin Farrell in the lead roles, and even sold the European distribution rights. The wheels have since fallen off once again, but, having scored a hit for Warners with The Brave One, it is conceivable that Jordan will raise the extra few quid he needs to bring his dream project to fruition.
Graphic stasis
Watchmen, based on the feted graphic novel from Alan Moore, is a literate, mature, and narratively innovative deconstruction of that most basic of comic book staples, the superhero story. It has been on the verge of becoming a movie for almost 20 years. Speculation over a big-screen adaptation has remained constant since the book's publication in 1986, with the likes of producer Joel Silver (of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises), Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) throwing their hats into the ring at various times. The spotlight is currently on 300 director Zach Snyder; it is alleged that principal casting has taken place, but given this project's turbulent history, I wouldn't bet on it.
Morgan's sci-fi
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke's groundbreaking science-fiction novel from 1972, has encountered an even more fraught journey from script to screen; acquiring the film rights in the late 1990s, Morgan Freeman planned to both produce and star in the film for director David Fincher, who was badly burned by studio interference on his previous intergalactic excursion, Alien 3. The enormous budget required to realise Clarke's imagery has yet to be secured and it seems unlikely that the film will be rendezvousing with audiences any time soon.
Quixotic projects
On the knotty subject of adaptation, no novel has caused more directorial meltdowns that Cervantes' Don Quixote. Orson Welles, in his piecemeal, cash-starved fashion, put together a film based on the Spanish fabulist over the course of a great many years. After his death, it was finished to an acceptable degree by Jesus Franco, but is currently under lock and key in the Welles estate.
Quixote is also responsible for driving Terry Gilliam to the brink of dementia. He attempted his own version of the story with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with Johnny Depp. Like carrion vultures circling a dying animal, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe documented the farrago in the illuminating Lost in La Mancha, both a portrait of a film floundering on the twin crags of epic bad luck and financial over-indulgence, and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Gilliam and Depp claim that they will tackle Quixote again, once the financing is secure.
Mysterious Mr Smithee
Considering that money is a key factor in a film's self-combustion, it comes as no surprise to learn that speculative sci-fi scripts have an unusually high casualty rate. Other ideas are absorbed into the fog of Hollywood and emerge as committee-ruined shadows of their former selves - Alien 3, Alien Resurrection and Supernova being choice examples. The latter, which began life as Dead Star, the premise of which is that mankind discovers an alien machine capable of literally taking him to hell, attracted Swiss visionary HR Giger (designer of the creature in Ridley Scott's Alien), Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Hill, wound up as the work of Alan Smithee, the moniker assigned to films disowned by their directors.
