The DEVELOPMENT HELL TOURNAMENT (The Greatest Films that were never made)

Jim_K · 08-16-2003, 12:07 PM

THE DEVELOPMENT HELL TOURNAMENT
(The Greatest Films that were never made)

WHAT IF ……..? That is the question. Have you ever read about a film project (past or present) that got mired in Development Hell? Proposed films that if they ever got off the ground could’ve resulted in something special. A concept for a film that could’ve possibly joined the ranks of greatest films of all time. Lost films that regrettably you’ll never be able to see on the silver screen.

Rules: Eligible films MUST have some basis of fact that it was ever considered to be made into a feature film. No film ideas that just sprung up from your own fertile imaginations please.

Be descriptive:
Title, source material, Director, actors, writer, etc. Brief summary is a must!

I’ll start things out with a couple of automatics (I’ll add more if I see there’s any interest in this tournament)

MASTER LIST

Everyone has 2 Automatics

george kaplan · 08-16-2003, 05:49 PM

The follow-up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I don't remember the details right now, but I'll take to elaborate later.

Angelo.M · 08-16-2003, 08:56 PM

Not sure if these fit your criteria...

Watchmen
Director: Terry Gilliam was linked to this for a long time; M. Night Shayamalan and Darren Aranovsky have also been mentioned.
Original source material: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's graphic novel, Watchmen, published by DC.
Rumored actors: ?
Summary: Anything but your typical 'superhero' story; an intricate, entertaining deconstruction of the standard 'superhero' myth using characters that resemble heroes from the Golden Age of comics.
Other screen adaptations: None; Pixar's The Invincibles, due next year, may be the humorous version, and likely just as brilliant.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Director: Terry Gilliam, again!
Original source material: Take a guess...
Rumored actors: Johnny Depp, Jean Rochefort (Quioxte)
Summary: A time-traveller (Depp) meets an elderly Quixote. Hilarity ensues.
Other screen adaptations: Don Quixote has been filmed many times. Gilliam's struggles to make the film are documented in the film Lost in La Mancha.

SteveGon · 08-16-2003, 10:55 PM

Great idea!

My autos:

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon

The great director had long planned on making an epic film covering the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. The story on that is apparently going to be published. Go here for details.

Orson Welles' adaptation of Don Quixote

Welles never completed this film though Jess Franco (of all people) "finished" it for him. Go here for details. Some of the Welles footage can be seen in the documentary Lost in La Mancha.

Some suggestions:

I believe Welles had planned on adapting Heart of Darkness but it never came to fruition.

George Romero's original version of Day of the Dead which wasn't filmed due to budget constraints. I hear the screenplay for this version is available on the new DVD edition of DOTD. This one's kind of iffy but if ya need filler...

David Fincher's Rendezvous With Rama. What happened to this?

Angelo: good call on Watchmen.

george kaplan · 08-17-2003, 12:22 AM

I'm torn for my second choice between The Blind Man, a Hitchcock / Jimmy Stewart thriller and The Godfather film that never got made that was about the years between Part 2 (the DeNiro story) and the beginning of Part 1. The film would have focused on Sonny. Although I have to admit also being intrigued with the original idea for Star Trek 6, called Starfleet Academy about Kirk's days there.

**HTF Ads**

Kirk Tsai · 08-17-2003, 06:55 AM

Tora Tora Tora!
Directors: Akira Kurosawa and David Lean
The troublesome shoot of the film was one of the dark chapters in Akira Kurosawa's career. What was originally proposed to him by Fox, however, was that he would direct the Japanese portion of the film, with Mr. David Lean directing the American sequences.

Current version: directed by Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasaku, the film now has some good battle sequences, but reveals nothing about Pearl Harbor that we do not know.

The Seige of Leningrad
Director: Sergio Leone
Leone died in 1989 preparing the story of Leningrad during WWII. It was to be a co-production with the Soviet Union (which I suppose would have fallen out after the fall of the USSR anyhow). But if it were to come true, the USSR probably would have provided massive landscape and human resources to dramatize the historical victory. I think it's safe to assume The Great Ennio Morricone would have scored the film.

Jim_K · 08-17-2003, 08:24 AM

Excellent choices all around.

George we need details, details, details.

Since everyone came up with some great choices I'll up the ante with 2 more automatics for everyone.

SteveGon · 08-17-2003, 09:20 AM

Okay, I'll go with Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness. Apparently he did write a treatment and planned to make the film in 1939. Unfortunately, the start of World War II closed the European market for films and it wasn't thought that Americans could handle the complexities of the story. Welles has also planned to use the camera as the eyes of the narrator so perhaps this unique approach turned off potential investors?

I realize Welles had many other unrealized projects, but Heart of Darkness was important to him and it certainly would have been an interesting film.

I'll be back with my second auto...

SteveGon · 08-17-2003, 09:26 AM

I think I'll go with David Fincher's Rendezvous With Rama. I haven't been able to find any current news on the status of this film so I think it's safe to say that it's in "development hell."

SteveGon · 08-17-2003, 09:43 AM

Here's a few paragraphs from Indiewire about a film Samuel Fuller never completed:

Quote:

Fuller, cigar tucked between his lips, gives the curse on his project a human name. He is speaking to Jim Jarmusch, whom Kaurismaki had asked to accompany him to Brazil while Fuller looks for the Indian village where he had shot footage in 1955 for a film to be called "Tigrero." (Jarmusch becomes an interviewer, then a participant.) "It's not WHAT was behind this, it's WHO: Daryl Zanuck!"

Zanuck, then head of Fox, had sent Fuller to the Amazon to scout locations. Armed with a 16mm camera and a rifle, Fuller shot a few scenes. The film would star John Wayne as a tigrero, or bounty hunter; Tyrone Power as a prisoner in a Rio jail; and Ava Gardner as Power's wife, who kills a guard to help him escape. She hires Wayne to get them through the Mato Grasso, but only the Indians know some of the shortcuts. The last part of the story is set on a disintegrating island in the Amazon. The husband won't risk his own life on the island for her. He gets killed anyway, and the tigrero also saves himself first. "I attack love!" Fuller exclaims proudly.

Zanuck had actually cancelled the project for the same reason that Gilliam's fell through: insurance problems. Fuller had given Zanuck footage of what he considered a place safe for shooting. "The insurance company wanted to work around it," Fuller, who died in 1997, says in the doc. "And they wanted $18 million to insure the three stars. Zanuck nixed it." The footage was not wasted: Some appears in other Fuller movies, like the protagonist's mad scene in "Shock Corridor" where he hallucinates a dance by village men in grass skirt.

According to Kaurismaki, who had moved from Finland to Brazil years earlier, his doc began by chance. Fuller told him over dinner in Paris that he still possessed amazing footage of men in grass skirts performing hunting dances in an isolated village, but did not remember where in the Amazon it was. "I told Sam and his wife, Christa, that the whole episode could make a nice film, and they agreed. A week later I received a package containing the footage Sam had shot in the jungle. I watched it with a Brazilian friend who is an expert on Indians, and he knew right away which tribe and which village. I visited this village of Karaja Indians with my friend and prepared the filming, then returned with Sam and Jim." Encroaching "civilization" had altered the tribe to its detriment since Fuller had first arrived.

"It was a very improvised and fast project where all of the pieces fell in place naturally," Kaurismaki adds. Why did he undertake it? "

I've used up my autos so would someone...