Tales From Development Hell (28 page)

“The only time I countered anything was when I read an angry review of the script on a popular film-gossip site that I won’t honour by naming. The reviewer ranted on and on about how stupid it was, and how stupid I was for having created it. Then, to demonstrate how bad it was, he included the first
page. And guess what? I had never seen that page before. It was obviously a script written by a fan-boy or something, that had been circulated on the Internet as the ‘official’ Warner Bros script. So I tried to set the record straight, but by the time I stumbled across this site the controversy had already died down, anyway.”

Following the Internet backlash, little was heard from the producers. “I think right now they’re licking their wounds,” Gaiman told Andy Mangels. “They got laughed at rather more heartily than they expected for their last idiot script.” As Farmer recalls, “A few weeks went by with the buzz that it was about to go into pre-production, then I got a call saying they were going to look for another writer, with no explanation why. Later I realized it was probably due to the Internet reaction — which is a silly attitude if you think about it. They’re perfectly willing to destroy the source material and piss off the fans, but if the fans find out about it
ahead
of time, they pull the plug. There was also some talk about an option on the DC source material coming up, so the idea was in the air that Gaiman had pulled it somehow. But I never found out if that was indeed the case.” Gaiman, for the record, denied this possibility. “Warners own Sandman outright; always have done,” he told Ain’t It Cool News. “DC Comics owned all rights back in the days when I signed the original contract with them. Obviously Roger [Avary] couldn’t have taken the rights away to shop around. Nor could I.”

For Farmer, in addition to earning him a great deal of money and — for a time, at least — kudos from the producers who had hired him
and
the studio which paid him, his involvement with the
Sandman
project also taught him a valuable lesson. “If someone hires you to write something, then presumably they think you can write better than they can; otherwise they’d just do it themselves,” he points out. “So, rather than do what you’re told, you’re far better off doing what you believe is best. Had I done that with
Sandman,
I might still have created a version that didn’t get produced, but at least I would have kept my personal dignity intact. Because at the end of the day, the only one who’ll get the blame for the script is the writer.
Sandman
was a project that no studio should have tried to do,” he adds. “It was doomed to fail. Now, after all is said and done, everyone involved in that failure can simply say, ‘It was Farmer’s fault.’ In hindsight, it’s clear that this was the sole purpose for which I was hired.” In other words, he says, “Live and learn.”

Following the Farmer
débâcle,
two years passed before anything of substance emerged regarding the
Sandman
project, although for a time the Internet was rife with casting speculation, mostly from fans. “They always have ideas for
casting,” Gaiman told the website Cold Print. “It’s one of the immutable laws of the universe now — if you get two
Sandman
fans together in an enclosed space for more than fifteen minutes, one starts saying, ‘So, if you were doing a Sandman movie, who would you have play him?’ And the other would say, ‘Oh, Daniel Day-Lewis.’ And the first one says, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and they go off from there.” Gaiman had already written to Ain’t It Cool News dismissing as “silliness” the rumours that
Stand by Me
star Wil Wheaton
(Star Trek: The Next Generation
’s Wesley Crusher) had been cast as Morpheus, and noted that when he had last been consulted on the project — during the period of Roger Avary’s attachment — he did not recall the director having named a favourite actor for the role, “although he mentioned a number of people, including Daniel Day-Lewis, David Thewlis and Rufus Sewell as people he’d be interested in. All English actors.” As ever, Gaiman refused to be drawn on his own dream casting, although he did talk to actress Fairuza Balk
(The Craft)
about the possibility of an adaptation of his
Sandman
spin-off comic book miniseries
Death: The High Cost of Living.
Gaiman, thinking that he may want to direct the film himself, even made a practice run with a short film based on a story by his
Books of Magic
collaborator, artist John Bolton.

It was not until the dawn of the new Millennium that a new screenwriter became attached to the
Sandman
project. David J. Schow was one of the revolutionary horror writers to have emerged around the same time as Clive Barker, and who, along with John Skipp, Craig Spector, Ray Garton and others, was part of the ‘splatterpunk’ movement which tore away the last taboos in horror, writing the kind of works that made James Herbert look like Barbara Cartland. When he turned to screenwriting in the early 1990s, one of his first assignments was adapting J. M. O’Barr’s tragic comic book
The Crow
for director Alex Proyas. Says Schow, “I was approached by Brian Manis of Peters Entertainment in June of 2000. He had several script drafts and a whole raft of treatments, all in pursuit of what the studio wanted, which was ‘a more commercial approach’ [to the material]. What that means, who can really say? I immediately contacted Neil Gaiman to get his pre-approval, or at least his sanction, for any damage I might wreak on his creation, and Neil basically said, ‘You’re free to try anything you want.’ He insisted that I read the Avary-Elliott-Rossio draft and made sure I received ‘the whole of
The Sandman’
— ten books. That was my first exposure to the material.”

Schow received no notes from the producers prior to commencing work on his ‘pitch’. “I was left pretty much to free-range,” he says. “In retrospect, I realise this was because they had a number of writers working on a number of
approaches simultaneously, which isn’t uncommon.” As well as getting up to speed on ten volumes of
The Sandman
comics, Schow undertook what he calls a “breakdown read” of an undated draft of an earlier
Sandman
script credited solely to Elliott and Rossio. The draft was not bad, he felt, “just diffuse — it tried to cram in too many characters and incidents from the source book. It seemed arcane, mannered, and discursive, with no actual characters until about halfway in.” In addition, he felt that the script suffered from a problem endemic to comic book adaptations: a pressing desire to tell the ‘origin’ story. “Ever since
Superman
and
Batman
established the ‘template’ for [comic book] adaptations,” he observes, “studios have become obsessed with ‘origin’ stories they hope to parlay into series franchises. Well, in most endeavours, the origin buries the story. Story becomes secondary and,
voilà,
no franchise. This has happened more times than I can count. So if
The Sandman
was to follow the origin-story route, I felt the origin had to be secondary, or better yet, left for another movie. If the first movie is confusing, or no good, there won’t be a franchise. I think the emphasis on the Sandman’s origin is what jumped the script off the rails in the first place.”

Schow’s approach was to tell a more focused story. “Face it, the source material ran to nearly a thousand pages,” he says. “So I reduced the players, basically, to four: Sandman, Death, Corinthian, and a normal human character I invented, named Grace, who suffers from every sleep disorder known to science. Grace’s mother was essentially Rachel from the comic, and her link to Sandman. She’s also blood-linked to Corinthian, hence, all kinds of conflict. Once Grace and Sandman are paired up, we experience the horrible
wrongness
of Corinthian, we quest for the recovery of the Sandman’s power objects, we visit Hell, we meet The Endless, and Sandman battles Corinthian in the dream realm, then the fight slops over into the real world.”

For Schow, equally important to doing justice to the story, and Gaiman’s writing, was to capture the tone of the comic book. “The triumph of the comic is its melancholy tone, its atmospherics, its emotional resonance,” he explains, “not the chapter-and-verse on who came from where. I wrote for this tone. Corinthian is turning all the world’s dreams into nightmares, and needs to drive Grace to suicide to accomplish his programme. Sandman must regain his lost tools and reinstate himself as one of The Endless. He’s even forced to sleep like a normal human, in order to gain access to the dream realm, and this moment of frailty, of course, undoes him. Grace has to find Sandman in the dream realm, basically, without a map. But the rules of The Endless have only caused Sandman suffering and grief. Grace tells him,
‘Don’t save the world. Save me.’ And, wham — third act. It was very bleak, but uplifting in the way of a single candle flame in darkness. I could tell you more,” he adds with glee, “but you would be driven totally insane.”

Schow worked on his treatment for a month, between June and July 2000. “I didn’t write a script,” he says. “I wrote two fleshed-out and fairly detailed treatments. Then, game over. And I was never paid a dime.” After that, he says, “It descended back into the dream realm-type limbo where it remains to this day, because there is no Sandman — at least, not one powerful enough to rescue all of us from studio executives.” Despite the lack of a screenplay commission, Schow looks back fondly on his month in the dream realm. “I loved twisting and turning Neil’s clay,” he says, “and still think it would make a great movie. And I hope Neil does, too.”

Gaiman, however, was not so sure. “I couldn’t quite see why they got him to do what they did, having seen his outline,” he says. “The powers that be had already thrown out the Jon Peters/William Farmer script and plot approach and decided (at the time) to go back to the Avary draft, so I suspected that Dave Schow was just an attempt by the Jon Peters people to prove that their approach really would work.”

A year after Schow’s brief sojourn with the project, the website Universo HQ quoted Gaiman as saying that he had received another outline “for another [version of the] movie a lot like the really bad one. It’s always the same. They want a love interest now, for the Sandman. They want the Corinthian to be the big bad guy. He’s like the Sandman only more powerful. And they want them to fight, and for the Corinthian to menace to kidnap his girlfriend. It’s just stupid.” Little has been heard of the stalled
Sandman
project since what Gaiman has described as “the strange, sad, Development Hell morass that Jon Peters has thrown it into... With any luck it will remain there forever. I would much rather that a Sandman movie were never made, than that a bad Sandman movie was.”

If
Sandman
is ever granted a reprieve from Development Hell, Gaiman has said, “I just desperately hope that it’s a good movie. I don’t have any control over it, so I’d much rather keep it at a distance and keep my fingers crossed.” Perhaps, he has suggested, Sandman’s destiny lies on the small screen. “I would love
Sandman
as a television series. I think it would be wonderful. But I don’t think that it will ever happen. They have been doing these drafts of the script and they have been getting worse and worse and they have fired anybody who did have a clue. My own hope is that some time in my lifetime you’ll get a director who loved
Sandman
and wants to make it, in the same way
that Sam Raimi made
Spider-Man
or Peter Jackson made
The Lord of the Rings.”

In the meantime, Gaiman takes his occasional glimpses behind the Hollywood curtain in his stride. “My assumption with things in Hollywood is that it is ‘Looking-Glass Land’; everything is upside-down and madness, and the odds of anything happening in Hollywood is small. They buy 18-30 projects for any one thing that actually makes it through the system and comes out, so I always thought they would need to buy at least 18 of my things before anything got made, and the fact that I have had
Stardust, Beowulf
and
Coraline
actually get made [means] I’m doing incredibly well.”

So well, in fact, that Warner Bros eventually began to pay attention to Gaiman himself, not only as the author of the original work, but as a potential architect for the comic book’s screen adaptation, by then no longer in the hands of Jon Peters. Despite previous reservations about the possibility of barbecuing his own baby, Gaiman walked once more into the Hollywood threshing machine, albeit with eyes wide open. “We’d had all these paintings done so we could talk them through the storyline of the ten volumes of Sandman,” he says. “We had all the dolls, the statues, the things that have been made so that was there in front of them, and I did a two-hour presentation, and I remember sitting down and one of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Neil, that was very interesting. We went out for lunch recently and we figured that we’d worked out why the
Lord of the Rings
and
Harry Potter
films, which are our two biggest hits of the last few years, were such successes, and we figured it out: it’s because they have clearly defined bad guys. Has Sandman got a clearly defined bad guy?’ And I said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ And they said, ‘It was great seeing you,’ and I walked out. And that was the last thing I ever heard about Sandman.”

_____________

1
This notion of including a ‘sacrificial lamb’ in a screenplay is not uncommon, because screenwriters know that studio personnel who write ‘coverage’ of scripts for their executive bosses always like to have things they can single out which they feel don’t work in a script, much as surveyors like to draw attention to minor flaws in a building to show they’ve done their jobs properly.

2
Jonah Hex,
released in 2010, was one of the biggest box office flops of the year.