The Watchmen movie had been optioned in August 1986 by Lawrence Gordon, producer of 48 Hrs, Brewster’s Millions and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Within the next few years, Gordon would go on to produce the Predator and Die Hard movies and Field of Dreams, as well as comic book adaptations The Rocketeer, Timecop and Hellboy. Moore was reportedly offered the chance to script the Watchmen movie; the offer may have been made face to face when he met producer Joel Silver, who remembers, ‘I had lunch with Alan and Dave Gibbons at the time and he was an odd guy. But he was very intrigued and interested in the process. He was game to be involved.’ But Moore declined the opportunity, citing a heavy workload, and instead Sam Hamm was assigned to the job, having delivered his script for a big-budget Batman movie in October 1986. He impressed Moore when they met: ‘His reason for doing Watchmen was that if someone’s going to fuck it up he’d rather it was someone who cared about it. He said, “I realise I’m defeated before I’ve started so I’ve got to take a Samurai attitude to it: that I’m already dead, so I’ll discharge myself with honour.” I couldn’t ask for a better attitude.’
Hamm’s main task was to condense twelve issues of the comic into a feature-length story, which he achieved mainly by ditching all hints of the Minutemen, the earlier generation of superheroes. This means the disappearance of the suggestion in the comic that Nite Owl is following in the footsteps of an earlier crimefighter by the same name; more significantly, the removal of an entire backstory involving the Comedian and Silk Spectre’s mother (there is nothing in the script to say that the Comedian is any older than his team-mates). In the new story, all the superheroes were formerly part of a team called the Watchmen, which was forced to disband in 1976 after they accidentally blew up the Statue of Liberty while thwarting a terrorist attack. There are some nice touches: for example we catch sight of a war memorial commemorating those ‘who gave their lives to achieve victory in Vietnam. Below it are the names of the American dead. There are almost four hundred of them’. And the script is keen to emphasise the slight differences between our world and that of the film, with details like self-lighting cigarettes. In part, this is because the changed ending depends on it: in this version, Ozymandias plans to save the world from nuclear holocaust by changing history to prevent the creation of Dr Manhattan (whose presence, as in the comic, has affected the course of the Cold War). At the end, he succeeds and the surviving Watchmen find themselves in our world, looking distinctly out of place in their superhero costumes.
Terry Gilliam was appointed to direct, and the movie went into pre-production. Rumours began to fly that Robin Williams was keen to play Rorschach, Jamie Lee Curtis would be the Silk Spectre, Richard Gere Nite Owl, and that Arnold Schwarzenegger was happy to shave his head and be painted bright blue to play Dr Manhattan. Moore was even able to see the sunny side of that last rumour, reminding fans that Dr Manhattan had originally been Jon Ostermann, the son of a German immigrant. Gilliam, though, was not happy with Sam Hamm’s script. It missed very few of the story beats from the present-day sequences of the comic, but failed to get under the skin of the characters: ‘He had made some very clever jumps, but killed it. He made it into a movie, but what did you end up with? You ended up with these characters, but they were only shadows of the characters in an adventure. And I didn’t think the book was about that.’
Gilliam set about a rewrite, sitting down ‘with Charles McKeown, my writing partner on Baron Munchausen and Brazil, to squeeze out a script. Time passed. Frustration increased. How do you condense this monster book into a 2 to 2 1/2-hour film? What goes? What stays? Therein lies the problem. I talked to Alan Moore. He didn’t know how to do it … I suggested perhaps a five-part miniseries would be better. I still believe that.’ A second draft was completed, credited to Gilliam, Warren Skaaren and Hamm (but not McKeown). It’s essentially a redraft of Hamm’s script, with certain elements, including Rorschach’s voiceover, restored from the comic. Gilliam was still unhappy to lose so much material from the original, but in the event, that was not the main problem. As he explained: ‘Joel Silver said he had $40 million to do it, but he didn’t have $40 million, he had about $24.25 million, and we talked about the fact that I had just made Munchausen, which was a huge flop that had gone over budget, and he had just made Die Hard 2, which had gone way, way over and had been less successful than hoped. So the two fools were running around Hollywood trying to raise money for this thing that’s darker than anything.’ Long after the project collapsed, Gilliam continued to field questions about Watchmen, and he was approached to direct again in 1996, when a new version of the script had been written.
V for Vendetta was also optioned in the late eighties, with Joel Silver again set to produce. A dystopian science fiction story was a far more bankable prospect than a superhero movie at the time, and nothing in the original comic demanded a vast budget, so it would seem eminently more ‘filmable’ than Watchmen. Despite this, the project never really seemed to pick up momentum. One reason might be that the studios felt V for Vendetta was too parochially British. Moore remembers an early attempt to rectify this:
Now in the first screenplay that I got for V for Vendetta, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover. Eventually I think they realised that was a stupid idea.
Hilary Henkin, author of the screenplay for Road House (1989), and who would go on to receive an Oscar nomination for co-writing Wag the Dog (1997) with David Mamet, wrote a second V for Vendetta script around 1990. This shifted the action into a more generic science fictional landscape, so that Bishop Lilliman oversaw a newly manufactured state religion and the Fingermen (simply plain-clothes policemen in the comic) were half-goat mutants operating from a building in the shape of a giant finger. In this version, Evey is tortured by the government, her captivity isn’t faked by V, and at the end, she learns V was her father. Yet it’s not quite the travesty that those details suggest. It positions the story in the same sort of New Wave SF idiom as work by long-time influences on Moore like Michael Moorcock and William Burroughs, and is clearly informed by works like Harlan Ellison’s ‘“Repent Harlequin,” Said the Ticktockman’ and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, stories that Moore had always cited as influences on V. This version nonetheless baffled Moore: ‘As I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?’
One movie based on Alan Moore’s work was released in the late eighties: Return of the Swamp Thing (1989). Subject to the deal struck before Moore began working on the character, the filmmakers had the rights to use characters and situations from any Swamp Thing comics, including Moore’s run on the book, without him or his artists being consulted, credited or compensated – a situation that naturally irked Moore, but which by that point was a long way down the list of his grievances against DC Comics. So, the film’s title sequence was a montage of comic book panels and covers, many from Moore’s run, Swamp Thing had some of the powers Moore granted him, like the ability to grow new bodies and control plant life, and the story featured the romance between the protagonist and Abby introduced by Moore; producer Michael Uslan told an interviewer, ‘that, to me, is a wonderful Beauty and the Beast/Phantom of the Opera love story’. There’s even a short sequence where, like Swamp Thing #34, Abby eats a tuber from Swamp Thing’s body and the couple are able to make love – the episode, depicted in the comic with pages of LSD-trip imagery set to poetry, becomes in the movie a soft-focus dream sequence in which, for the duration, Swamp
Thing has a human body. At the end of the movie Swamp Thing and Abby walk off into the bayou together, the scene fading to an image reminiscent of the cover to Moore’s final issue.
The project was not aiming to be a horror film: the poster promised ‘a cross between Little Shop of Horrors and The Incredible Hulk with a light spritz of Hairspray’, while Uslan admitted at the time, ‘This is a general audience Swamp Thing … we cannot do a movie that’s on the plane of philosophy of the Alan Moore comic. We cannot reach the kind of audience we need to reach by going into a line-by-line adaptation of the kind of work they’ve produced so well in the comics.’
Moore was surprised to read this: ‘I thought, well, that is an astounding admission. What do you mean “it’s only a movie”? Isn’t it supposed to be “it’s only a comic”? This is the field that gave us Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin and all the rest of it, you’re telling me you can’t reach the same philosophical depth as I can in a copy of Swamp Thing?’
Even as Uslan was being interviewed, work was concluding on another movie he was producing. Batman, scripted by Sam Hamm and directed by Tim Burton, proved to be a dark, complex comic book adaptation that audiences flocked to in the summer of 1989. The year after that, the indie comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a bona fide phenomenon. Studios were now very open to the idea of making ‘comic book movies’ and a raft of titles based on comics, old and new, began to appear. Superhero movies, though, remained a highly unpredictable prospect. Dick Tracy (1990), lavish, stylised and starring Warren Beatty, was hyped, but underperformed. The Rocketeer (1991) and Spawn (1997) barely proved profitable. Tank Girl (1995), Judge Dredd (1995), Barb Wire (1996) and Steel (1997) all made back only a fraction of their production budgets. On the other hand, Batman Returns (1992) did well, and its critically derided sequel Batman Forever (1995) actually did better. Two of the biggest movies of the nineties, Men in Black (1997) and The Mask (1994), were also based on obscure comic books.
As the options for Watchmen and V for Vendetta expired, they were renewed, and Moore and his co-creators received a fresh round of payments. In February 1994 Don Murphy, co-producer of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), written by Quentin Tarantino, optioned From Hell on the strength of the first Tundra issue. As the graphic novel hadn’t been finished, Moore wrote a 5,000-word synopsis of the remaining chapters. Murphy was a fan of Moore’s work, while Moore described Murphy as ‘a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about.’ Murphy met Moore about half a dozen times. They discussed Fashion Beast, as well as ideas for an original movie featuring Nic Cage as a magician. Murphy optioned The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in Kevin O’Neill’s words ‘before I’d finished drawing the first issue’ – before it even had a publisher, in fact – saying he’d bought the rights when ‘it was only a three-page idea sheet. It was amazing.’ Murphy was also a fan of Moore himself: ‘He is a big personality and very smart and charismatic. I really thought he was a great person – a genuine genius and eccentric. I discussed the deals with him, got him an ICM agent for League, made sure he was well represented.’ The optioning of his work was lucrative for Moore: Murphy claims Moore was paid ‘$800,000 for From Hell, $1 million for League’. Eddie Campbell was able to use his From Hell option money to quit his day job as a metal fabricator and set himself up as a publisher.
Throughout the nineties, various rumours and tentative announcements of Watchmen and From Hell movies would surface from time to time, but all the projects remained in the early stages of pre-production. The experience allowed Moore to spot a pattern: ‘I was under the illusion that the way that films worked was that you got a lot of option money and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren’t going to make the film, which was a perfect result.’ Around 1998 even Big Numbers was optioned by Picture Palace Productions. Producer Alex Usborne saw it as a twelve-part TV series along the lines of the BBC’s 1996 political saga Our Friends in the North. Moore was more enthusiastic about this prospect, seeing it as a good way to complete the Big Numbers project, but in the event nothing came of it.
In the late nineties studios finally managed to crack the nut of the superhero movie formula. The first picture to do so featured a C-list Marvel character, Blade (1998) in a fast-moving, mid-budget film that did far better than anyone expected. It encouraged the development of other projects based on much more prominent Marvel characters, X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), which between them made well over $1 billion at the box office and became lucrative franchises. The trend was too much for Barry Norman, the most prominent British film reviewer, who announced his retirement in April 2001 explaining that he wasn’t enjoying his job anymore because ‘the film industry has changed and I find it slightly depressing that almost all the big movies coming out of Hollywood next year are based on comic books.’ The next ten years or so would do nothing to change Norman’s decision. Indeed, alongside dozens of superhero movies, there were many that were less obviously adapted from comics, including A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, Ghost World, 30 Days of Night, Art School Confidential and Whiteout.
Academic discussion of movie adaptation has evolved over time. In the introduction to his influential book Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (2005), New York University professor Robert Stam warns, ‘The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. Terms like “infidelity”, “betrayal”, “deformation”, “violation”, ‘bastardisation”, “vulgarisation” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium.’ He suggests that we should be wary about simply listing what’s been added or subtracted from the book, or talking in terms of what’s been ‘lost’ in translation between media. This is a shame, for while the directors and stars tend to laud Moore in the press pack and DVD extras, the decisions they make have usually moved their film away from the source material, almost always making the movie version less successful artistically than the original comic.
From Hell serves as a textbook example of how the Hollywood system takes a long, difficult book and turns it into an action thriller that’s designed to play well in multiplexes. The most fundamental change is that while the comics version shows us that Jack the Ripper is William Gull within the first few pages, the movie version reveals it only as a twist towards the end, and the main character is Johnny Depp’s detective, Abberline. Producer Don Murphy explained, ‘There’s just no way you’re going to convince a studio that Jack is the main character. Y’know it would be very fascinating, it would be very interesting to watch Jack, but that’s not a popular commercial film and there was never, ever a discussion. Right after I became friendly with Alan Moore and hung out with him and talked to him, it was like you understand that this is immediately going into Abberline’s story, it’s really going to be about the guy who we as an audience – we’re going to have Johnny Depp in the film – we’re going to follow and although Jack should be prominent, Jack should be a major character, it’s not Jack’s story, it’s Abberline’s story. And that’s the major departure.’
Moore and Campbell had, of course, deliberately chosen to avoid the conventions of the murder mystery genre, and of all previous Ripper fiction’s portrayal of the murderer as a top-hatted silhouette. Eddie Campbell says of being told that the movie would be a whodunit, ‘they put it to me almost as though it was a good idea. I remember they said, “Eddie, look, we’ve got this great idea.” They said, “Look, you don’t know who the Ripper is until right at the end!”. That was the first thing we kicked out, because Alan absolutely detested the idea of turning murder into a parlour game.’
A number of critics felt that the movie was a ‘Disneyfied’ version of the original. As Iain Sinclair noted in his Guardian review, ‘From Hell
returns to source, as a penny-dreadful, a shocker; a distortion of place and time. An industrial product crafted to stand alongside the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.’ The project had started at Miramax – a division of Disney – who had clearly wanted a more family-friendly movie about the serial murder of prostitutes. The directors, the Hughes Brothers, read the comic only after they had read the first version of the script, and when they had done so came up with a new draft that tried to recapture at least some of the original’s spirit.
Campbell remembers, ‘there was an earlier version of this script, where [Abberline] escapes, he goes into Special Branch and he steals a file, or he looks at the file, gets the information he needs. Then he hears somebody coming along the corridor. And there’s no way he can get out that room and out the building without being caught. So he turns and he sees a window open, and it’s overlooking a railroad track. He quietly climbs out of the window onto the ledge, jumps onto a train that’s passing below, lands on the roof … At the time, we first read this 1995, 1996, I’m trying to picture our Abberline jumping onto a moving train. Our fat guy … So they’d obviously changed that by the time the movie got made. I didn’t like the original script. The script was certainly improved, I will say that.’
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 37