Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  But the movie was released to lukewarm critical reception and box office. Some reviewers unfamiliar with the source material thought they had diagnosed the problem: ‘When I walked out of the movie theater after watching From Hell, I had one thing on my mind. What the Hell were they thinking? Only later when I discovered that the movie was based on a graphic novel did it sink in just where the movie was coming from. Because like a graphic novel, this movie is beautiful to look at, but has little substance.’ It’s an analysis that’s particularly galling to Alan Moore, who has championed the medium and constantly tried to come up with new ways of telling stories within it: ‘And I have gotten tired of lazy critics who, when they want to insult a film, they’ll say it has “comic book characters” or a “comic book plot” – using “comic book” as code for “illiterate” … I’m not going to claim all comic books are literate – there’s a lot of rubbish out there. But there have been some very literate comic books done over the past twenty years, some marvellous ones. And to actually read a comic, you do have to be able to read, which is not something you can say about watching a film. So as for which medium is literate, give me comics any day.’

  The critical consensus was perhaps best summed up in a conversation between Eddie Campbell and interviewer Dirk Deppey for The Comics Journal:

  DEPPEY:

  I was of two minds about the film version of From Hell. I saw it with our news editor, Michael Dean. Driving back, we were discussing the film, and we basically came to the conclusion that it wasn’t in any way close to the quality of the book, but on the other hand, if you were somebody who had never read the book and had no interest in it, and you just went to it expecting a slasher film, then you probably got something a little more high-minded than you were expecting. Does that make any sense?

  CAMPBELL:

  Yeah, I would agree with that. And that’s what I was expecting. They did a fine job at that level.

  Moore never saw From Hell and had no strong feelings one way or the other, either before the movie came out – when Uncut stated that ‘reports from Prague, where the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) are currently adapting his hugely acclaimed Jack the Ripper strip, From Hell, for the big screen, are met with complete indifference. Johnny Depp’s in it, you say? Nigel Hawthorne? Heather Graham? He doesn’t care. It’s not comics. “I’d be quite happy if they made Carry On Ripping. It’s not my book, it’s their film”’ – or subsequently. He did not exist in total isolation from the movie: he had read the scripts, and Iain Sinclair reported in his review for the Guardian that Moore ‘was staggered’ when he saw photos from the set. He researched the Hughes Brothers, and was delighted to learn that Heather Graham was in the movie, because she had played Annie in Twin Peaks, ‘so with me she merits a particular kind of sainthood’. So his comment that ‘I haven’t seen the From Hell movie yet. I might see it when it comes out on video’ clearly goes beyond mere neutral incuriosity. Don Murphy says, ‘He told me that from the day he optioned it. I thought that was odd but not that big a deal. He was invited to the set and the premiere. I can’t recall – he might have sent his daughter to a screening, but he had no interest. Eddie and his daughter came to the film premiere and had fun.’

  Moore had known at an early stage that the movie would bear little resemblance to the comic, and this prompted him to keep his distance. At this stage, it wasn’t because he thought the film would make him angry. He wasn’t disowning the movie or being hostile, it was genuine disinterest: ‘As far as I know, the From Hell movie – while it really is nothing like my book, apart from a couple of scenes here and there – was probably a decent attempt at trying to film a book that is, when you think about it, pretty much unfilmable. I believe that they did probably as good a job as anybody could, the Hughes Brothers … which is to say, that they probably still shouldn’t have bothered, in that the end result would have so little resemblance to anything that I wrote that they might just as well have made their own Jack the Ripper film, with their own story.’

  Unlike From Hell, the first volume of the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a straightforward action-adventure. And for the movie, as with From Hell, virtually everything from the comics was ditched apart from the ‘high concept’, a few ideas and specific scenes, some design work and most of the character names. As Moore noted:

  There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don’t believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite.

  The script for LXG was written by James Dale Robinson, a writer well regarded for his Starman and Justice Society of America comics at DC. Sean Connery was cast in the lead role of Victorian adventurer Allan Quatermain – a coup, but one that meant there was little budget left for any other star names. The story was no longer an ensemble piece but was largely about Quatermain and, as with From Hell, paths deliberately not taken in the original comic became features of the movie; thus Mina Harker is a subordinate of Quatermain’s rather than being the nearest thing the team have to a leader (Harker, a character from Dracula who was bitten by the Count, is also explicitly shown to be a vampire in the movie, something the comic never quite rules out but remains deliberately coy about). And there were more concrete problems: Connery and director Stephen Norrington clashed repeatedly – to the point that reports appeared in the press suggesting they had almost come to blows, and some cast and crew members took steps to prevent the two from ever being alone together. By the time the movie had wrapped, both had vowed never to make a Hollywood film again. The standing sets in Prague were destroyed in severe floods.

  LXG was released in July 2003 to terrible notices (‘Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this,’ said Ed Park in The Village Voice). A number of reviewers, such as Charles Taylor of the Salon, were careful to absolve Moore of blame:

  After this movie and From Hell, Moore fans might start to take comfort that the movie version of his Watchmen has never come to fruition. His stories seem tailor-made for the movies, but his dark sensibility and the creepy pleasure he gets in playing with historical what-ifs don’t fit with the mindlessness most mainstream blockbusters exhibit right now. The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you’re likely to see this year or next – and it’s been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

  The movie made over $100 million dollars more than it cost, and its release saw a spike in sales of the comic in May which put the book comfortably at the top of the graphic novel chart. But there was no appetite from the makers or the audience for a sequel. Alan Moore barely said anything about LXG, except to note the irony that in From Hell, they had changed the character of Abberline to make him ‘an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers. On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain … Sean Connery didn’t want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain’s character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor.’

  By September 2003, it seemed like LXG had been and gone. At the end of the month, though, writers Martin Poll and Larry Cohen sued Fox Entertainment Group, Twentieth-Century Fox and Fox Filmed Entertainment claiming that their script, Cast of Characters, had been stolen to make the film. Their lawsuit named Moore as party to this, and made some very specific allegations about his conduct. To head off the obvious defence that LXG was the adaptation of an existing comic book, it was claimed that ‘[President of Twentieth-Century Fox Film Group Tom]
Rothman, or others at Fox under his direction, provided Moore with ideas from COC that are protected under state and federal law. Thus, Moore could write a graphic novel to provide a smokescreen behind which Fox could hide when plaintiffs inevitably saw COC being misappropriated as LXG.’

  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was hardly the first story to take characters from Victorian fiction and team them up. Philip José Farmer’s fictional biography Tarzan Alive! (1972) was only the first of his books to play with the ‘Wold Newton Family’ concept that many of the heroes of popular fiction – Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and countless others – were descendants of people who’d been present in a Yorkshire village the night a radioactive meteorite hit the ground nearby. There’s a whole subset of modern Holmes pastiches that pit him against his real life and fictional contemporaries, including Jack the Ripper, the Phantom of the Opera, Freud, H.G. Wells and the Martians from The War of the Worlds. It wasn’t even the first time Alan Moore had done it – he has said that ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen actually conceptually grew out of Lost Girls because we’d had so much fun doing three fictional characters in a sex context that I thought maybe this could work as an adventure book’. In fact he’d alluded to the concept earlier still, in the introduction to the first Swamp Thing collection (1987), where he’d explained superhero crossovers by analogy: ‘For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself subject to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I’m sure that both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent.’

  Both The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Cast of Characters, then, are part of an enduring literary tradition. Any lawsuit had to be about specifics, not just the idea of literary mash-up. On the face of it, some of the changes made from the comic for the movie version, such as the addition of Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer, did bring it closer to Cast of Characters. So had the makers of the LXG movie started with Moore and O’Neill’s comic and then incorporated some ideas from an earlier pitch for a similar story, Cast of Characters? Don Murphy’s answer is categorical: ‘I knew it existed as a script because several persons had said “Oh, League is like that.” But I never read it. Still haven’t.’

  Then there’s the question of whether Alan Moore might be complicit in such a scheme. Anyone familiar with Moore would, to put it mildly, find it difficult to imagine he would be a Hollywood movie studio’s first choice as a tame stooge. It’s unclear, though, whether the plaintiffs did know anything about Moore or the comics field. While the document was keen to stress their credentials as ‘well-known and respected figures in the film industry’, it didn’t mention Moore’s stature in the comics world. There was no mention that he was a UK resident who didn’t even have a passport or an internet connection. It didn’t refer to Kevin O’Neill, co-creator of the series, or note that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was creator-owned and so it had cost Fox a substantial amount of money to acquire the rights. Besides, it is a matter of record that Moore had first mentioned The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in an interview carried out on 8 July 1996, nearly two full years before June 1998 when the lawsuit alleged he had been briefed to write it. Don Murphy says ‘the claims were beyond insane. They had Moore conspiring with the then head of the studio, who was somebody Alan never met or would even talk to.’

  The case proceeded anyway, and Moore was called as a witness. In the words of the New York Times, ‘Mr Moore found the accusations deeply insulting, and the ten hours of testimony he was compelled to give, via video link, even more so. “If I had raped and murdered a schoolbus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,” he said, “I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for ten hours.” When the case was settled out of court, Mr Moore took it as an especially bitter blow, believing that he had been denied the chance to exonerate himself.’ But Fox’s lawyers decided to settle the case on 29 December 2003, before it went to trial. As Don Murphy explains,

  the lawsuit was settled for a pittance because the studio insurance company didn’t want to pay for a trial. That’s it … I took the whole thing personally. The movie had taken $200m worldwide but because we opened against Pirates of the Caribbean the US total was lacklustre. Then these clowns come along and sue … somehow it got settled. That was crap. Alan’s reaction I never understood. My Scottish wife says that Brits aren’t used to lawsuits. Fair enough. But the litigants were alleging malfeasance on his part and his signed contracts provided he be available to testify that he had not stolen the ideas. He did that and did that brilliantly – and then went nuts on everyone, cursing Hollywood and swearing off it forever. I became the latest in the long list of friends banished forever. It’s a shame really, but nothing that can be done about it.

  Moore blamed Murphy, having learned during the deposition that Murphy had sent a prank email to the plaintiffs saying that Moore had been given the ideas by someone at the studio. Murphy admits that ‘in a fit of pique I sent an anonymous email – it said basically “No, it wasn’t the head of the studio, it was the guy who got the coffee”. It turned out they went crazy trying to figure out who sent this, it was the only evidence they had which meant they had nothing.’ But Moore didn’t see the funny side. His encounters with legal affairs – the ‘Marvelman’ title, the Watchmen contract and now this – reinforced his belief that legal decisions had very little to do with right and wrong, and everything to do with corporate shenanigans. He had made a conscious choice to keep out of the way of the movie versions of his work, but found himself dragged into court anyway. He couldn’t just ignore them, after all. ‘I’ve decided that I don’t want anything more to do with films at all … I thought if I’m going to react, I may as well overreact, y’know. So, I said, right, that’s it, no more Hollywood films. And if they do make films of my work, then I want my name taken off of them and I want all the money given to the artists. I thought, God, that sounds principled and almost heroic!’

  Then, the next Monday, he received a phone call from DC’s Karen Berger:

  She said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be sending you a huge amount of money before the end of the year because they’re making this film of your Constantine character with Keanu Reeves.’ And I said, ‘Right, OK. Well, take my name off of it and distribute my money amongst the other artists.’ I thought, well, that was difficult, but I did it and I feel pretty good about myself. Then I saw David Gibbons who I had done Watchmen with and he was saying, ‘Oh Alan, guess what, they’re making the Watchmen film.’ And I said, with tears streaming down my face, ‘Take my name off of it David. (sniffles). You have all the money.’ Then I got a cheque for the V for Vendetta film. It was just, this was within three days!

  Moore had no control over these projects, all of which were based on his DC Comics work, and they came at a time when his relationship with the company was breaking down over, as he saw it, editorial interference in the ABC line. So he found it easy to elide the problems he was having with Hollywood and those with the comics industry, particularly as DC and Warner Bros, the studio behind all three movies, were both part of the Time Warner multimedia empire.

  There had been a period of détente between DC and Alan Moore. From 1999, DC had published the America’s Best Comics line while keeping out of Moore’s way, as agreed, and both parties seemed determined to get their non-relationship to work. Relations had in fact thawed to the point that in the summer of 2000, DC announced at San Diego Comic-Con that they would be celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Watchmen (the following year) by publishing Absolute Watchmen, a $100 slipcased hardcover edition for which the original story would be recoloured and a second volume included containing the full scripts and other behind-the-scenes material. There would also be a range of Watchmen action figures, with four prototypes displayed at the convention. This was all being done with Moo
re’s blessing, and a new documentary he recorded with Dave Gibbons was shown by DC at conventions that summer.

  At the same time, though, DC stepped in to block the publication of two ABC titles. The first was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 (June 2000), which reproduced a genuine Victorian advertisement for a ‘MARVEL whirling spray syringe, the new injection and suction vaginal syringe’.

  DC publisher Paul Levitz felt that this was an insult to DC’s arch-rivals, Marvel, so the original print run was pulped and a new edition, containing an identical advert except with the brand name altered to AMAZE, appeared within weeks. The same month, Levitz also blocked a Cobweb strip, due to be published in Tomorrow Stories #8, that recounted a true story involving L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and his involvement with occultism. Moore told Newsarama:

  the DC lawyers seem to be very sane, practical people. As a creator, I’ve heard for a long time what lawyers are like, but actually speaking to Lillian Laserson, she was practical, sane, responsible, professional and logical. We went through it for an hour, talking about this six-page story, and the reference book that I’d taken most of the story from, how it’s all in the public domain and is all over the Internet, and it’s been in two or three magazines and a book. This is stuff that there’s no possible threat of litigation, which I think Lillian pretty much agreed with, and then Paul Levitz apparently said, even so, he didn’t want it to go out, which I think was the case all along. I think Lillian was a bit perplexed as to why an hour of her and my time had been wasted …

  This was exactly the sort of editorial interference that had always rankled with Moore, but his contracts gave him little room for manoeuvre except to spit feathers. With his opinion of Levitz now little better than his attitude towards Dez Skinn when Warrior had been on its last legs, Moore disowned the Watchmen anniversary project, saying ‘there’s just been a lot of stuff recently where I’ve been trying to cooperate with DC and be friendly, but this has not been reciprocated’. Editor Scott Dunbier was able to smooth the waters and Moore continued to produce regular scripts for the ABC range.