Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  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.