Tales From Development Hell (26 page)

The first issue of
The Sandman
appeared in comic stores in December 1988, signalling the arrival not only of one of the most important, critically acclaimed and commercially successful titles of the era, but also, in Gaiman, of a significant new talent. Gaiman was immediately bracketed with a group of mostly British writers, including Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, who would finally earn comic books — a medium barely a half century old, and still in its infancy as an art form — the right to be taken seriously in literary terms. “Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture,” Gaiman wrote in the afterword to the first collection of tales from
The Sandman,
entitled
Preludes & Nocturnes.
“[It was] as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him.”

In its lifetime,
The Sandman
won a great many awards, not the least of which were the two most prestigious in comics: the Eisner and the Harvey. Issue nineteen, a self-contained story entitled ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (and inspired by the play) won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, making it the first ongoing comic ever to win a literary award. The title also won acclaim from a wide variety of other sources — Mikal Gilmore wrote in
Rolling Stone
that “to read
The Sandman
is to read something more than an imaginative comic: it is to read a powerful new literature fresh with the resonance of timeless myths” — and won such diverse fans as Clive Barker, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Norman Mailer and singer-songwriter Tori Amos, the lyrics of whose song ‘Tear In Your Hand’ refer to “me and Neil” hanging out with “the Dream-King”. Within six months of
The Sandman’s
debut, Tim Burton’s
Batman
had heralded an inevitable new wave of films based on comic books, and with the takeover of DC Comics by Time Warner (the parent company of the Warner Bros film studio) there seemed little doubt that Sandman’s own destiny lay on the big screen, despite Gaiman’s heartfelt belief that, to make the story film-shaped would be “like taking a baby and cutting off both of its arms and one of its legs and nose and trying to cram it in this little box, and filling the rest of the box up with meat.”

One of the first screenplay adaptations was undertaken by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who had helped revive the fortunes of the ailing Walt Disney
studio with their screenplay for
Aladdin.
“After turning in a draft that we felt was pretty good, very true to the book (Neil Gaiman liked it — good enough for me), we were told the script was so bad, the studio considered it undeliverable,” Rossio later told the Coming Attractions website. This meant that Warner Bros felt it was within its rights to refuse delivery of the script, withholding the delivery tranche of Elliott and Rossio’s fee until they had reworked it to the studio’s satisfaction — a response almost unheard of among A-list writers. “I probably should mention [that] between the time we took the assignment and turned it in,
[Batman
producer] Jon Peters got himself attached as producer,” Rossio added. “Like a parasite. That makes the host sick, and kills it.”

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.”