Tales From Development Hell (42 page)

In the meantime, a company calling itself Fantastic Voyage Associates, who claimed ownership of the title and concept behind the movie, contacted science fiction writer Kevin J Anderson, best known for a series of authorised
X-Files, Star Wars
and
Dune
novels, to propose him as author of a new
Fantastic Voyage
novel. “I remembered the film and the Saturday morning cartoon of Team
Proteus
involved in numerous microscopic adventures,” he says, referring to the 17 episode Filmation series which ran on ABC-TV from September 1968 to January 1969. “The basic idea had so much potential! How could I not want to be turned loose in that milieu?” Anderson was given no specific direction, “except to create my own story and
not
connect it directly with the film or characters,” but watched the film and read both of Isaac Asimov’s novels before tackling his own story. “In my novel,
Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm,
the
Proteus
team goes where no one has gone before: they explore one of the alien bodies from a crashed UFO, which comes complete with nanotechnology protective mechanisms.” As Anderson toiled on the novel during the year 2000, he recalls reading scattered reports of a possible remake, “but nothing ever came of it.
Microcosm,
on the other hand, was published on schedule. Another example of the difference between publishing and filmmaking.”

Indeed, little was heard of the
Fantastic Voyage
film project under Cameron’s stewardship, as the director spent much of the decade after
Titanic
planning and then making his next box office record-breaker,
Avatar.
Then, in September 2007, Roland Emmerich revealed to
Empire
magazine the fate that seemed to have befallen Cameron’s version. “I was attached to this project fifteen years ago with Dean Devlin,” Emmerich explained, “and then we gave it back because we wanted to do some other original projects we
had developed.” At this point, Cameron came aboard, and in 2005 invited Emmerich to consider directing the project. “Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for
Fantastic Voyage —
it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over and I hated it.”

Chief among Emmerich’s gripes was the screenplay’s futuristic setting. “I said, ‘Why have you put this in the future? Let this happen now — it’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, ‘Well, we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body.” Despite the Navy SEALs present in the Morgan and Wong draft created under his earlier attachment to the project, Emmerich also disliked the militaristic aspects of Cameron’s approach, calling to mind Michael Biehn’s rogue Navy SEAL in Cameron’s
The Abyss.
“There were two submarines in the body,” Emmerich explained. “It was like a Navy SEALs film. And then the president of production at Fox — me and my partner and him all go surfing together — says, ‘Well, will you do it with a page one rewrite and we won’t start until you’re happy with the script?’ So then I said yes. The key,” the director of
The Day After Tomorrow
and
2012
added, “is I won’t do it unless it’s going to be a good movie.”

A writer’s strike delayed work on the next script, written by
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
co-writers Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, and by the time it was completed, Emmerich was busy directing
2012.
James Cameron, on the other hand, had finished making his game-changing 3D blockbuster
Avatar,
and was potentially available once again to oversee
Fantastic Voyage.
“We’ve been working on a script for
Fantastic Voyage
for a few [years],” Cameron admitted at a press conference for
Avatar
in December 2009, “but that’s not for me to direct. That’s just to produce. It’s quite different,” he added, “but it’s got enough of the original story that you still recognise it.” A year after
Avatar’s
record-breaking release, Cameron executive produced the underwater thriller
Sanctum,
partly as a way to test cameras which could potentially be used not only on
Avatar
sequels — but also
Fantastic Voyage,
which would now almost certainly be filmed in 3D. By this time, a new
Fantastic Voyage
script was being worked on by screenwriter Shane Salerno, whose sci-fi spin on Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai, Doomsday Protocol,
had sold to Fox a year earlier, and whose 1998 smash hit
Armageddon
could be a seen as a blueprint for a sci-fi blockbuster with an implausible mission at its core.

Then, in March 2010,
Variety
reported that British director Paul Greengrass was in talks to board the project as director, marking not only his first
venture into science fiction, but also his first in 3D. Given that his recently released Iraq War film,
Green Zone,
had failed to repeat the success of his twin entries in the
Bourne
franchise, Greengrass may have figured that hitching himself to a would-be event movie such as
Fantastic Voyage
was a good way to keep himself on the A-list. For whatever reason, no deal was ever reached with Greengrass, who moved on to an update of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island.
Then, in September 2011, Shawn Levy was announced as the latest director of the
Fantastic Voyage
remake. Levy had directed three hits for 20th Century Fox, including
Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum
and
Date Night,
before cutting his sci-fi teeth on the futuristic actioner
Real Steel
for DreamWorks, and the studio evidently considered him a safe pair of hands for a large-scale blockbuster which wouldn’t break the bank.

“I haven’t read any of the latest incarnations,” says Tab Murphy, “but I’m sure they started from scratch and adhered to Cameron’s ‘vision’ of the movie.” Says Morgan, “I do recall being shocked that it could all go south so fast and they would pay us all that money without ever really reading or dealing with the script.”

“There’s always such a fine line between what gets made and what ends up in development hell,” adds Murphy. “In the past, I would always blame myself for not delivering a script that was ‘good enough’, but I now realise that many ‘good’ scripts never see the light of day for a variety of reasons, the least of which, at times, is the result of a weak script, because many weak scripts end up getting made. It’s enough to drive a screenwriter batty. The main thing is, I’ve stopped beating myself up about it.” James Wong, for his part, doesn’t look back. “It’s weird,” he told Sarah Kendzior. “It’s like you love these things so much, and then you realise they’re gone. And to pick them up again, it’s just a lot of heartache. You just kind of like to remember what it was, I guess. It’s like, never look into a casket at a funeral. Just remember them the way they were.”

_____________

1
The card was changed in later years, once the novelty of the moon landings had worn off.

2
Fantastic Voyage
earned $4.5 million in print rentals, from a production budget of $6.5 million, a poor return on investment.

L
ike most screenwriters, over the years I’ve had my share of nearly-weres and also-rans. I had Robert Downey Jr. attached to one script, and Matthew McConaughey attached to another — attachments, it turned out, with all the adhesive properties of tap water. One of my scripts was so close to a green light, I was being emailed pictures of the location where shooting would begin within a few weeks; another project had such built-in brand awareness —
T.J. Hooker: The Movie
— it was assumed, like a giant corporation on the verge of bankruptcy, to be ‘too big to fail.’ Just like
Titanic.
(The ship, not the movie.) Of the ten feature screenplays I’ve written or co-written, either under commission or ‘on spec’, I’ve had precisely none produced, despite the comings and goings, not to mention promises and assurances, of numerous producers and directors. Within a year of publication of my first exploration of the excruciating tortures of Development Hell,
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made,
I too had been sentenced to the infernal place.

Although I had begun writing for the just-launched
Empire
magazine in 1989 — my first film review being published in the second issue — I officially entered the film industry in a professional capacity in 1990, when I joined what was then the UK’s biggest film marketing agency, The Creative
Partnership, as a copywriter. Although this led to numerous occasions where I was writing material for film luminaries such as Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Leslie Nielsen, John Cleese, Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell, it was largely my parallel pursuit as a film journalist — writing for everyone from
The Guardian
to
Fangoria
— which led to my subsequent creative collaborations with filmmakers.

One example of this was when Darren Aronofsky, attending the Deauville festival of American film with his first feature, π, asked if I could recommend a Japanese anime which would be ripe for a live action makeover. I immediately suggested Satoshi Kon’s psychological thriller
Perfect Blue,
in which a teenage pop star, attempting to shake her squeaky-clean image by starring in a gory horror movie, finds herself stalked by a deranged fan determined to kill those responsible for her career’s change of direction. With the help of an anime-expert friend, I acquired a fan-subtitled copy of the film, transferred it to NTSC, and posted it to Aronofksy in New York. His response was as enthusiastic as it was instantaneous, and he immediately began making overtures to secure the remake rights, promising me an executive producer credit for my trouble. Although Aronofsky managed to secure the rights, the remake did not materialise — although he did borrow one shot from it (an overhead image of a young woman in a bath) for his next film,
Requiem for a Dream.
¹

Although I had dabbled in scriptwriting since the early ’90s — without, as is customary for neophytes, actually finishing anything — my screenwriting career began around the turn of the new millennium, when I was inspired to write something ‘on spec’ (i.e., without anyone actually asking, much less paying). The script was for a putative pilot for an equally hypothetical television spin-off from British director Rupert Wainwright’s moderately successful horror film
Stigmata
(2000), in which a priest (Gabriel Byrne) in the employ of the Vatican investigates a young woman (Patricia Arquette) who appears to be possessed.

I had taught myself the craft of scriptwriting not by attending classes, or burying myself in well-meaning ‘how to’ books, but by reading scripts: approximately half way through the published collection
Three Screenplays
by Richard Price — which contains his scripts for
Night and the City, The Color of Money
and
Sea of Love
— I felt I knew enough to stop reading and start writing.
(This sort of self-belief, hubris or downright arrogance, is absolutely essential for the budding screenwriter; after all, if you don’t think you have what it takes to write a script, you’ll never put ribbon to paper.)

The script for my
Stigmata
spin-off — proposed as an
X-Files
-type supernatural drama in which a sceptical priest travelled the United States investigating and debunking ‘miracles’ on behalf of the Vatican, while slowly uncovering an evil conspiracy to grow a new Christ from DNA found in the holy cross — turned out rather well. The main character, though inspired by Gabriel Byrne’s turn in Wainwright’s film, could have been played by any actor from late thirties to late fifties, and a connection to the film itself wasn’t essential — the series could easily have stood alone. I even had a title ready:
Revelations.

Knowing that MGM, the company behind
Stigmata,
would not accept an unsolicited submission, I sent the completed script, plus a ‘story arc’ overview and character breakdown, to the film’s director, Rupert Wainwright, via his people at United Talent Agency. A week or two later, he called me to say there was no way MGM would consider a
Stigmata
spin-off, due (he said) to a breakdown in relations between the studio and Frank Mancuso Jr., who was a contracted party for any
Stigmata
sequels, prequels, spin-offs or other exploitation. He did, however, like the script. “There’s an idea I had about sixteen years ago,” he said, “and you might be the man to write it.” This was all the encouragement I needed to hop on a plane to Los Angeles in order to hear his pitch in person.

Wainwright and I met in the bar of Hollywood’s famous art deco hotel The Argyll, where the director proceeded, over the course of twenty smoke-fuelled minutes, to tell one of the best stories I had ever heard: inspired by Robert Frazier’s
The Golden Bough,
it was the tale of a once-famous writer, Tom Weaver, who exiles himself to a remote Greek island, Aricia, in an effort to break his writer’s block. No sooner has Tom been shipwrecked and literally washed up on the shore, than he is attacked by one of the locals in a berserk rage, and forced to defend himself in a fight to the death. Somehow, Tom manages to mortally wound his attacker. He soon finds that the island’s other inhabitants begin to regard him as their new leader, a kind of high priest — and subtle supernatural powers (not to mention an ethereal beauty) seem to come with the job. Naturally, it’s all very temporary, and Tom quickly discovers that there is a Faustian price to pay for his idyllic existence: every now and then, strangers will come to Aricia to try to kill him, thereby taking his place as ruler of the island paradise.