Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  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, Re
quiem 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 Mon
keys, 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.