Tales From Development Hell (2 page)

That’s Development Hell.

The case studies outlined in this “updated and expanded” Second Edition could hardly be more varied. There’s detailed coverage of such famously unproduced films as
Crusade, ISOBAR, Smoke & Mirrors
and
The Hot Zone.
An exploration of early, ill-fated attempts to bring
The Lord of the Rings
to the screen. An examination of how promising scripts for Tim Burton’s
Planet of the Apes
remake and the
Tomb Raider
movie devolved through development into the crushing disappointments they became. The bizarre true story of
Total Recall
’s fifteen-year development, an epic gestation almost matched by its putative sequel... Rejected scripts and storylines for the fourth Indiana Jones film and the fifth Batman film. The various Howard Hughes projects which crashed and burned as soon as
The Aviator
took off. A brand new chapter detailing superstar directors James Cameron and Roland Emmerich’s involvement in the proposed
Fantastic Voyage
remake. And more.

Not wanting to repeat any of the films covered in
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made,
I have left out the tortuous development of, for instance,
Superman, Silver Surfer
and
The Fantastic Four
— but that book is still available – and, indeed, recently revised and updated – and besides, the sorry tale of Neil Gaiman’s
The Sandman
more than makes up for it.

In covering these stories, I have tried not to editorialise, to pass judgment on the content of the scripts themselves. If I naturally favour the writer in most instances, that is only to be expected, since I am one myself. Indeed, I believe that my commitment to the project is illustrated by the fact that several of my own screenplays are currently rotting in Development Hell – as detailed in the final chapter, also new to this Second Edition.

At least this book made it out alive.

David Hughes

September 2011

“They wanted Indiana Jones meets
Lawrence of Arabia.
Most of the scripts were the latter with none of the former — though one was so confusing I couldn’t figure out which line it fell on.”

— Ted Henning, screenwriter

O
n a Friday in February 1993, Hollywood was buzzing with more than just the usual combination of traffic, cell phones and celebrity gossip. At two separate studios in Burbank and several high-profile agencies, the word-of-mouth concerning a 128-page script by two unknown writers was increasing from ‘buzz’ to cacophony, as executives at Warner Bros and The Walt Disney Company engaged in a bidding war to secure the rights to what had become, almost overnight, the most sought-after script in Hollywood.

The script at the centre of all this excitement and activity was Lee and Janet Scott Batchler’s
Smoke and Mirrors,
a historical epic written ‘on spec’, and inspired by actual events from the life of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), the father of modern stage magic — and, incidentally, the magician who inspired Ehric Weiss to become ‘Houdini’. “This was the gentleman who, in the mid-1800s, virtually invented the art of stage magic,” Lee Batchler explains. “Vanishing, levitation, illusion, and all the things that David Copperfield and the other Vegas magicians do. He had an engineer’s mind, and he figured out how to do all that, without all the rather tacky Chinese robes that were the fashion of the day. He would do his act in a tight tuxedo so there was clearly no place to hide anything, and
he would produce these incredible things from nowhere. He became a very rich man.”

Lee recalls reading Robert-Houdin’s autobiography, the last chapter of which is devoted to a visit the magician made to Algeria in the 1850s, to debunk a local tribal leader or marabout, Zoras Al-Khatim, who was said to be using divine magic to incite an uprising against the French occupiers. “So the French government had the bright idea of bringing the world’s greatest magician, Robert-Houdin, to go to Algeria and show these people that these were illusions. So he went down there and exposed the sorcerers for being the frauds they were. We said, ‘There’s a movie here.’” Adds Janet, “As we researched and thought through various ideas, we returned to that story and pitched it, among many others, to our writers group. The kernel of the story that would become
Smoke and Mirrors
was the one everyone responded to with extreme enthusiasm, and we knew we had found a story worth working on.”

As the story begins, Jean-Pierre Robert-Houdin (they had decided ‘Jean-Eugène’ would be too difficult for English-speaking audiences) has turned his back on his prestidigitatorial past — “Manipulating the laws of physics on one hand, twisting people’s minds on the other: it’s not a fit way to make a living,” Robert-Houdin declares in the script’s first draft — in order to devote himself to scientific study. This decision leaves Colette, his beautiful wife (and, in the magician tradition, former assistant), only too eager to escape the gilded cage of their estate in the Parisian suburbs by venturing into terra incognita on behalf of the French government, in order to help quell a rebellion being fomented there by Berber sorcerers. “These non-Arab anti-colonial rebels were committing deadly atrocities against all French in North Africa, including innocent women and children, and were trying to woo the peace-loving Arab population to their cause,” the Batchlers note, taking pains to head off accusations of anti-Arab sentiment at the pass. “As their credential of divine backing for their acts of terrorism, they performed very persuasive ‘miracles’ of black magic. A bloody civil war was about to happen if something wasn’t done.”

Just as all movie heroes initially resist the call to arms, Houdin is at first reluctant to accept the assignment. “Whatever days I have left,” he explains, “I’m not going to waste doing card tricks for Barbarian primitives in the God-forsaken desert, just to prove that my brand of lying is superior to their brand of lying!” Yet, as is also customary, he ultimately capitulates.
¹
Upon arriving in Algiers, Robert-Houdin’s forthrightness and contempt for authority land him in life-threatening danger, from which he is rescued by Darcy, a fearless French Foreign Legionnaire with a wooden hand, who quickly becomes enamoured of Colette. Although Colette seems equally entranced by Darcy, her flirtatiousness is perhaps designed more to regain her husband’s attention than to encourage Darcy’s, and the frisson this creates does not stop Darcy and Houdin becoming firm friends — not least when Houdin finds a way to repay Darcy for saving his life.

The second act sees Robert-Houdin, Colette and Darcy set off for the desert palace of Bou-Allem, the most influential Arab sheik in the country. “Bou-Allem, a devout seeker of truth, is still flirting with the rebels, waiting to be convinced as to whose side to take — Berber or French,” the Batchlers explain. “So he summons Robert-Houdin to a one-on-one command performance — basically a showdown against the rebellion’s chief sorcerer.” Though the odds are stacked against him, Robert-Houdin beats the sorcerer Zoras at his own game, totally disgracing him even in the eyes of his own men — and reminding the magician of his former glory. “We then weave elements from other historical research to create the climax for our story,” the Batchlers add, “which involves the trek from the desert wilderness back to Algiers via the treacherous Kabyle Mountains, where Robert-Houdin and his party are ambushed by a loyal remnant of the disgraced sorcerer’s army.

Our heroes take refuge and fight it out inside an ancient abandoned tenth century citadel, which we patterned after real fortresses that once existed in those mountains. Outgunned and outmanned, Robert-Houdin must marshal all his magician’s cunning in order to defeat his foes inside that fortress.” Thus, the stage is set for an exciting third act in which Zoras seeks vengeance for his humiliation at Robert-Houdin’s hands.

On 5 January 1993, after nine drafts, the Batchlers were finally ready to type ‘FIRST DRAFT’ on the title page of the script. “We weren’t sure what to do,” Janet later recalled. “We had no access to anyone who would be able to make a picture this big.” After sitting on the script for more than a month, Janet called an acquaintance at Longbow Productions, a small production company which had one big film to its name: the women’s’ baseball picture
A League of Their Own.
Although Longbow partner Bill Pace felt the script needed work,
he liked it enough to take an option on it, paying a token fee (typically one dollar) to the Batchlers, before sending the script to Howard Koch, Jr., who had a production deal at Paramount Pictures. Koch liked it enough to send it to the William Morris Agency’s Alan Gasmer. “Alan did a great job of talking it up without letting anyone see it,” says Janet, “and more and more people began to ask for it.”

Around town, as well as at the Sundance Film Festival, Gasmer let it be known that this project was about to come up for auction. He had sent the script out to various studios and producers, as is customary, hoping for a call-back from at least one of the few with the power and resources to option or purchase outright a script whose historical setting, special effects, star-driven subject matter and epic scale demanded a budget estimated at $55 million: Universal Pictures, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, Columbia-controlled TriStar, Warner Bros and The Walt Disney Company. “It was a movie-movie, like
Romancing the Stone, Star Wars
or
Indiana Jones,
with a
Lawrence of Arabia
scope to it because it had the desert and castles and such, and it came down to what studios had the nerve and the big bucks to pony up and say, ‘We want to play this game.’”

Among those to whom Gasmer had pitched the project was Jay Stern, a development executive at Disney-owned Hollywood Pictures, over lunch at The Grill in Beverly Hills. Stern’s response was immediate, and enthusiastic. “Sounds great,” he told Gasmer. “Please, I want this. That’s one I would really, really like to get my hands on.” Stern got his hands on the script the following Tuesday, and took it home with him, planning to read the first forty pages (typically, the first act of a 128-page script) before bed. Instead, he finished it. Stern called Gasmer first thing the following morning, and left messages with Interscope and Cinergi, two production companies with which Disney might share the costs of the mega-budget project.

Arriving at his company’s regular Wednesday morning story meeting, Stern pitched the story to his superiors, including Hollywood Pictures president Ricardo Mestres and Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, telling them that it was big, original, well executed, distinctive — and definitely going to be snapped up fast by a rival studio if they did not make a move on it. Mestres read the script that morning and agreed that Disney should bid, and immediately sent the script to Andrew G. Vajna, the Hungarian-born founder of Cinergi and producer of such big-budget films as
Judge Dredd
and
Super Mario Bros.
Unfortunately, at nearby Warner Bros, executive Tom Lassally had made the same assessment, and called Gasmer to ask what kind of deal his clients were looking for. “I’m looking for a million,” Gasmer told both interested parties,
with typical agent chutzpah. By Friday, after newly-installed Paramount production head Tom Levine had passed on the project, Gasmer had Disney, Warner Bros and TriStar readying their cheque books.

TriStar had already sent the script to Wolfgang Petersen, the German-born director who would later direct
In the Line of Fire
and
The Perfect Storm.
“I don’t know if they got an answer from Wolfgang,” Stern told Thom Taylor, author of
The Big Deal: Hollywood’s Million-Dollar Spec Script Market,
“but it was Friday afternoon and I knew that [Warner Bros executive] Bruce Berman was unreachable.” Indeed, Berman was snowed in at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, stuck on the tarmac on on United Airlines Flight 7 to Los Angeles, and therefore unable either to leave the plane, or even use his cellphone.

This being Hollywood, Stern used Berman’s predicament to his advantage: “I was concerned that as soon as Lassally reached Berman and had the conversation, that they would just put a million dollars on the table.” With Disney’s Mestres and Cinergi’s Vajna agreeing to split the development costs, with Katzenberg insisting that Disney’s exposure be limited to $14 million, Stern made Gasmer an offer he knew his clients could not refuse: one million dollars, with an additional commitment to commission the Batchlers to write another script, to be decided upon at a later date. Gasmer, however, was unable to reach his clients, who were en route to a weekend-long writers’ group seminar in Cambria, some 220 miles north of Los Angeles.

“Friday, the day the auction was coming to a close, was the day we were scheduled to drive up the coast to meet everyone for the weekend,” the Batchlers recall. “Because this was back in 1993, we didn’t have a cell phone, and had to stop every fifteen minutes or so, pull off the road, and find a pay phone to check in with Alan to see how things were going. We know his inability to get hold of us was somewhat frustrating to the people bidding — at one point an exec told him, ‘Get your clients to a phone and get them to stay there!’ — so eventually, we stopped at a small courtyard motel outside Arroyo Grande and stayed on the phone for about an hour, responding to the final bidding, until the deal was done.”

Giddy with excitement, the Batchlers celebrated in style, treating the other members of their writers’ group to dinner. “Unfortunately, that particular weekend we may have had the sale but didn’t have the cash in hand, so we had to borrow money from one of the other writers to actually hold the celebration dinner. We were rich on paper, but cash-poor.” The facts remained, however: the Batchlers had a seven-figure commitment from a major studio. Their names were now known by some of the most powerful
people in Hollywood. And their script was on the fast-track at Disney.