Smash Cut

Back in the days when George Lucas actually made enjoyable movies, he invited director Steven Spielberg and writer Lawrence Kasdan over to have a little discussion. The focus of the meeting was to come up with a screenplay centered around an rugged archaeologist, one that would be almost like a globe-trotting samurai with a whip instead of a sword. He’d come face-to-face with Nazis and other nefarious evil-doers in a breakneck adventure to uncover a legendary holy relic that’s reputed to bring its bearers power of unfathomable proportions: the Ark of the Covenant.

We all know that this story would become the basis of 1981’s unforgettable action classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. But even before the trio even dreamed up the name of Indiana Jones or thought about having Harrison Ford fill his shoes, they had a conference so that ideas could be bandied about, plot points ironed or abandoned, and characters envisioned in a non-stop volley.

That meeting was a gathering of three creators who, at the time, were at the top of their creative game, and we’re lucky that someone actually transcribed the conference, which is now available for our edification, reading pleasure, or plain old satisfaction of curiosity. If you’d like to have a window into the event that led to an unforgettable film and a truly iconic character, go here to download the transcript. It’s about 6MB in size, in pdf format. While it lasts, folks!

Can you believe it? A posting that isn’t about Watchmen!

In fact, I’m going back a good few years, all the way to 1964 to be exact.

That’s when screen scribe Jay Presson Allen, who also wrote such greats as 1964’s twisted Marnie and the 1981 cop classic Prince of the City, turned in her second draft of Mary Rose.

Mary Rose was to be directed by none other than the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, and it is, allegedly, the project that he wanted to make above any other. However, the acclaimed director’s desire was always met by studio disapproval, and the film never got greenlit.

The story was originally a play written by J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. Hitchcock had seen it performed during his youth and never forgot about it, so when Hollywood provided him the opportunity to feed his obsessions, he commissioned Allen to write a feature film adaptation of the play.

What interesting about Mary Rose is that it would’ve been, I think, the only true-blue ghost story to Hitchcock’s name had it ever gotten off the ground. The basic gist of the plot is that the titular Mary Rose returns to the Sussex home of her childhood where she meets her own son. The thing is, Mary’s a ghost, and her son isn’t the 2-year-old that he was when she vanished. He’s now a middle-aged adult, and because he has aged and she has not, there can be no reunion for the two. Mary can only return, alone, to spectral realm from which she emerged.

You can download a pdf of Allen’s Mary Rose screenplay here, courtesy of author/Hitchcock scholar Steven DeRosa’s amazing website, Writing With Hitchcock. Be forewarned: the file is about 21MB, so if you have a slow connection it could take a while.

Unless Optimus Prime turns into a Zoid, one of the sure-fire box-office smashes for this year is bound to be Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

If you absolutely, positively can’t wait to spoil the whole freakin’ movie for yourself, you can go here and — while it lasts — read one of the treatments for the film. What’s a treatment? In brief, it’s a prose version of the proposed movie’s narrative, kind of like a short story, that’s generally written before the actual script has been hammered out. The curious thing about this particular Transformers treatment is that the author’s name has been blackened-out, so…who knows who came up with this one, or if the final result will be anything like it.

Anyway, if you’re curious, go on over and have a look at it here.

In contemporary Hollywood vernacular, the Black List refers to a roster of all the “hot” screenplays that have crossed the desks of a variety of bigwig studio development suits and high-level assistants. It ranks those scripts, and each year’s list contains only material that circulated during that 12-month period. That means that these works stayed in screenplay format and never really became films that were released in theaters during that given year.

Basically, in a nutshell, the Black List is a line-up of the hottest projects circulating in Tinseltown that you probably haven’t heard of yet.

Inclusion on the list doesn’t exactly guarantee a great movie. For example, the Halle Berry-starring snoozer of a drama Things We Lost in the Fire and too-cute-for-comfort comedy Lars and the Real Girl are both previous listees from other years. But it’s always interesting to check out what’s floating the studios’ boats these days and to figure out what, exactly, they seem to be looking for. And yes, you will probably recognize the names of at least a few scribes in the bunch.

Thus, I have for your download and reading pleasure, a pdf (it seems to be somewhat “censored” or “incomplete”) of the 2008 Black List. While it lasts, boys and girls!

As Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox currently engage in their own superhero-sized legal brouhaha over which studio actually owned the movie copyright for Alan Moore’s acclaimed comic book maxi-series, I offer you fans another Watchmen-related duel: a battle of scripts!

I’ve written before in this blog about the fact that a whole slew of different directors and writers have come and gone while trying to bring the movie to life. I can now offer you a more specific look in the form of three rather different screenplays for the film.

Back in 1989, writer Sam Hamm, who was hot off of Tim Burton’s Batman that same year, was brought in by 20th Century Fox and producer Joel Silver to adapt the twelve-issue comics narrative into a screenplay format. Obviously, that version never made it much further than the printed page.

Fast forward a few years to 2001, when producer Lawrence Gordon and Universal Studios tapped David Hayter — a scribe who seems to have done a good share of voice acting work in video games and animation judging from his bio — to write and direct an adaptation. He completed a screenplay in July 2003, but then Gordon and Universal got into one of those pesky “creative differences” feuds and the producer took Watchmen away from the studio.

And that brings us to 2006, when Warner Bros. had (or claimed to have…perhaps a court is now going to have to decide that fact) the project with Zack Snyder set to take the helm. The studio roped in Alex Tse, a relatively young talent whose only major credit before Watchmen was the 2004 television gang drama Sucker Free City, directed by Spike Lee. Tse was brought in to rework Hayter’s material, and from most accounts this last bit of synthesis is what finally brought the movie to greenlight status.

For the curious, and those with a lot of time of their hands, I’m providing three different Watchmen screenplays below — one by Hamm, one by Hayter, and one by Tse (undated, so I can’t say it’s the “final” script) — and they mirror the evolution I mapped out above. The downloads may take a little while, as they total about 9.5 MB of material.

Sam Hamm’s Watchmen
David Hayter’s Watchmen
Alex Tse’s Watchmen

As a kind of addendum, I should probably point out that once filming began, Snyder tapped Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman to come in and do some doctoring, so you can bet that the final product won’t match up exactly with any of these scripts.

Some years ago, before they scored their Oscars for the rightfully acclaimed No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, known professionally as the Coen Brothers, had planned to film an adaptation of a terrific novel by James Dickey, the author of Deliverance.

Called To the White Sea, the book is a gripping tale of an American World War II gunner who ends up behind Japanese enemy lines after his bomber is downed by anti-aircraft fire. It’s a riveting story, one that illuminates one man’s survival against the odds, deftly mixing Dickey’s trademark poetic digressions with blood-and-guts action.

This would’ve been beautiful material for the Coens to work with: tense, yet beautiful, and largely dialogue-free, conditions that they proved they could handle with aplomb in No Country for Old Men. They quickly tapped Brad Pitt to star and began putting together a reported $60 million budget.

But then…things went wrong, as they often do in Tinseltown. The money didn’t come together, Pitt opted out for something else, and the project died. It did, however, leave behind a beautiful screenplay by the Coen Brothers, and if you’re curious to read it, you can download it here while it lasts.

You can imagine the movie that “could have been,” but probably never will be. According to a 2004 interview, in reference to To the White Sea, the Coens said, “No, that’s never going to happen, sadly.” Sad indeed. Pitt, however, has teamed up with the Coens for their forthcoming movie Burn After Reading, which opens this September. You can watch the trailer for it here, while hoping that perhaps, one day, they’ll all team up again and get the Dickey adaptation back in business.

Well, here ya go:

Inglorious Bastards Parts 1 & 2

But don’t get your hopes up too high, at least based on the opinion of Yours Truly.

Inglorious Bastards (or, as Quentin Tarantino mysteriously spells it in his 165-page script, Inglourious Basterds) is the award-winning director’s long-gestating World War II action epic, his homage to gritty battle movies like The Dirty Dozen, and ostensibly a remake of Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 Italian genre pic of the same name.

Hollywood rumor mills have already had a field day suggesting that Brad Pitt is being sought by Tarantino to play the lead role, Lieutenant Aldo Raine.

The titular Bastards are a guerilla squad of tough-as-nails American soldiers whose main purpose is to strike fear in the black hearts of the Nazi forces by some rather brutal tactics (I’m gonna try to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, folks). There is, in typical Q.T. fashion, an additional narrative arc, one that focuses on a French Jewish teen named Shoshanna hiding out in Paris. Both stories eventually dovetail together, as one might expect.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that one would also have the right to expect the screenplay to have been better written, and I’m not just talking about the constant misspellings, sloppy grammatical flubs, and oddball punctuation that pepper every page. (Perhaps this was an attempt at “style”?) Ultimately, the screenplay is so loosey-goosey and bloated that, for me, it never achieves any real momentum, unlike The Dirty Dozen. It’s jam-packed with the usual Tarantino-type monologues and fanboy cinematic references but I must admit that I wasn’t exactly wowed. Perhaps I’m just too jaded at this point.

In the end, I think the Castellari original is destined to be leaner, tougher and, quite frankly, better. Here’s the trailer for it: