The title character of Neil Gaiman’s critically acclaimed comic book The Sandman visited Hell. Unlike the film version, however, he made it back
“The Sandman movie is in Development Hell and may it rot there forever.”
— Neil Gaiman
In September 1987, DC Comics editor Karen Berger called Neil Gaiman, one of the UK’s most promising comic talents, and asked if he would be interested in writing a monthly title for the publisher. Berger had edited Gaiman’s Black Orchid, a lavish comic book miniseries illustrated by the author’s friend and collaborator Dave McKean; now she proposed reviving a long-forgotten DC character, ‘the Sandman’, and taking him in a radical new direction.
After a few false starts, Gaiman finally arrived at the premise and characters which would, over the course of the series’ seventy-five-issue lifetime (not counting a few additional stories in prose and sequential form published outside of the ongoing monthly title), become familiar to millions of fans worldwide: the Sandman — also known as Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, the Dream-King, or sometimes simply Dream — is the personification of the dream world where we spend a third of our lives; older and more powerful than the gods, he is also one of the seven ‘Endless’: the others being his brothers Destiny and Destruction, and sisters Death, Desire, Delirium and Despair. Early collaborators, including artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, colourist Robbie Busch, letterer and logo designer Todd Klein and cover artist Dave McKean, helped shape the many and varied worlds of The Sandman, while many others — including Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Steve Parkhouse, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Jill Thompson, Vince Locke and Daniel Vozzo — would help to carry the series through its seven-year life cycle.
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.”
“I watched Sandman, my great epic comics opus, go through traditional development hell,” Gaiman later told Neil Rosser, producer of a BBC Radio documentary adapted from the first edition of this book, “beginning with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the great writers who did Pirates of the Caribbean and such, doing these really very good drafts of a script which the producer at the time, Jon Peters, famously did not ‘get’. Roger Avary was brought on as director and he did a draft of their script, again it was very good, he went in, he showed them Jan Svankmayer’s Alice and said, ‘I want the dreamy sequences to look like this,’ and was fired. And then scripts came in and they got worse and worse.”
Following Avary’s departure, a new writer was brought aboard to start over: William Farmer, who had impressed the Sandman producers with his (then unproduced) script adaptation of another comic book, Jonah Hex.2 Although a fan of Jonah Hex, Farmer admits he wasn’t at all familiar with The Sandman. “I read the graphic novel called Preludes & Nocturnes, and some of the comics,” he says. “I found them to be very imaginative but undisciplined, as comics often are. I don’t mean that to be condescending. What I mean by that is, comics are generally free to take flights of fancy without the cumbersome weight of a three-act structure, since the story can presumably just go on and on and on. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s what the medium calls for. But it’s not a movie.
“I was working for Jon Peters’ company,” he adds, “though I only met the man in passing. I’m sure he had no idea what was going on with the story and didn’t care. The producers were Alan Riche and Tony Ludwig, who went on to do Mouse Hunt and Deep Blue Sea. But they weren’t really involved in the story development; they were basically just standing by listening to story conferences, trying to decide how much the thing was going to cost, where to shoot it — practical production concerns. The actual story executives I was working with on a day-to-day basis I won’t name. They know who they are. They’re parts in a machine, and I’m sure they’ve all gone on to take different slots in other machines by now.
“Basically, it was clear from the start that the goal of the project was to take the Sandman name and use it as a franchise, while making the actual story something more ‘for the masses’. So I was essentially brought in to do a whole new story that would simply be called Sandman.” Farmer read the most recent draft, by Roger Avary, which he found “interesting, but in the studio’s opinion — and I must admit, in mine as well — absolutely unfilmable. A very twisted and surreal kind of thing you might have been able to do in the ’70s, not the ’90s. No studio would have touched that version. I had some ideas that were very loyal to the source material,” he explains, “yet would tweak things here and there to make it more of an audience picture. But there were things the producers wanted done with it that took it in a different direction, and as I was a fledgling screenwriter, I figured you take the suggestions of the ones writing the cheques.” This, he admits, turned out to be a mistake — personally and for the project.
“Things were forced into it that really didn’t belong there,” he explains. “The producers were adamant that the coming Millennium must play a big role. Every film in development at that time had some damn thing to do with the Millennium. Of course this was folly, as the Millennium turned out to be no big deal, in the real world or in film — nobody really gave a shit. So it was a case of trying to bring my ‘vision’ to the project, but the range of that vision was squeezed into an increasingly narrow field by things the producers insisted must be in there. For example, one executive producer insisted, for reasons I’ll never understand, that there be a scene of Morpheus in a rave club. Don’t ask me why. There was no place for it and I can say with a tiny amount of pride that I at least refused to write that one.”
At one point, Farmer recalls positing the idea of meeting with Neil Gaiman to discuss things. “The reply was basically, ‘Nah, we don’t need to get him involved.’” Besides, as Gaiman told Ain’t It Cool News in 1998, “Where The Sandman movie is concerned, I’d rather not get involved. No one should be made to barbecue their own baby.” Farmer says that he wrote several drafts between 1997 and 1998. “When all was said and done, and we had the definite draft of my involvement, they were ecstatic. They were talking about a big franchise, this thing would be huge, blah blah blah... Of course everyone knew the source material had been massacred, but nobody really cared. It wasn’t about that, it was about a product name.”
While Farmer’s approach found favour with the producers and the studio, Sandman fans felt their worst nightmares were coming true when a review of his script appeared on Ain’t It Cool News, written by ‘Moriarty’. “Mistake number one: the whole thing is tied to the Millennium,” he wrote. “That’s rapidly becoming one of the most heinous, preposterous clichés in film. Stop it. By the time you get this thing finished and in theaters, even if you started right now, the year 1999 will essentially be over... The best quality of Gaiman’s work is its timelessness. Don’t make the mistake of grafting some momentary gimmick onto what’s already so good. Mistake number two: did you actually read any issues of the book, Mr Farmer, or were you doing the evil bidding of Jon Peters himself? And if the answer is the latter, then tell me, does Mr Peters in fact have horns and cloven hooves? The soft skull’s a given, but I’m trying to figure out if he has any real malice in his heart. After all, he’s currently working overtime to destroy one of America’s finest icons, Superman, and now he’s actively mauling one of the few examples of true graphic literature. This is one of those cases where changes are made for the sake of making changes, as a matter of ego, and not for any sort of sound dramatic reasons.”
Moriarty went on to summarise Farmer’s story outline: “Rose Kendall is the daughter of wealthy industrialist and all around Really Famous Wacko Harlan Kendall. When she was very young, her father used her in some nutty experiment in which he killed her, opened the Dream Gate, captured Dream, then brought her back to life. In doing so, he also managed to take the ruby, the bag of sand, and the helmet. So far — well, it’s at least vaguely recognizable. The Kendalls are new, but at least we’ve got Morpheus imprisoned and the icons of his office being scattered. Rose is afflicted with lifelong nightmares in which the man from her dreams asks to be released. Finally, just a few days before the Millennium, Rose is attacked by someone yelling about the Nightmare Man. She’s taken to a hospital where she has an encounter with someone vaguely like Gaiman’s Death (although with far more ‘zany’ wisecracks) and an ‘Angel’ appears, coming through from another world when Rose dies briefly on the table. Nice how she keeps doing that, eh? He takes away her nightmares and disappears.
“Back at the building her father built, there’s some sort of construction going on and the secret magic chamber where Kendall stuck Morpheus is found and blown up, releasing Morpheus. And here’s where things really go wrong, since the character that is released is a fairly indiscriminate killer with no real power of any kind. He beats some people up, jumps off something, gets hurt, and gets taken to the hospital. Morpheus. Lord of Dreams. Gets taken to a hospital after yelling tripe like, ‘As though your puny weapons could harm Morpheus! The lord of sleep! The Sandman!’” (Farmer subsequently contacted the website Comics 2 Film to deny the claim: “The horrible line ... has NEVER been typed by the fingers of yours truly,” and declare that “this was not at all the tone of my script for Warners.”)
“Well, of course the hospital that Morpheus is brought to just happens to be the same one Rose is in,” Moriarty continued, “and suddenly we’re in lame Terminator 2 rip-off country, with Morpheus going to look for Rose, and the Angel appearing again to save her. The twist here is that Morpheus is trying to kill Rose to save the world, while the Angel is actually The Corinthian, Morpheus’ brother, who has bet Lucifer, their other brother, that he can find the icons of Dream’s office first. Whoever gets them before the year 2000 wins. If neither does, then Lucifer takes over the earth for torture, misery, sorrow, yadda, yadda, yadda. Really. That’s really the story. And the rest of the film’s just a dumb action film with these two fighting over and over, and with them beating up people to get the various items. The ruby’s in a safe in a pawn shop. The sand’s in the study of Rose’s house. And the helmet? Well... giggle, giggle... dare I say it? It’s hidden inside Rose!”
Perhaps understandably, Moriarty took umbrage at what he saw as the wholesale reinterpretation — or, at best, misunderstanding — of Gaiman’s magnum opus. The Corinthian and Lucifer as Morpheus’ brothers? A character called Love as his sister? And an ending in which it was all just a dream? “Gaiman never, never cheated us like that. Even if something happened in a dream, it mattered. It counted. That’s the whole point. Our dream lives and our waking lives are one and the same. One affects the other. Gaiman made the point over and over, and Farmer has ignored it utterly.” Although Farmer had created a ‘nightmare plague’ loosely based on the ’24 Hours’ issue of Preludes & Nocturnes, Moriarty dismissed the idea as “nothing but a bunch of pointless atrocities without moral heft or payoff.” Overall, he added, “[Farmer] misses everything that makes the original work so unique, so special, so brilliant.”
Gaiman agreed, describing Farmer’s script as “the worst one yet. It was just sort of nonsensical, poorly written trash,” he told the Philadelphia City Paper. “These are not people who particularly care about Sandman,” he added. “They want it to be the new Batman & Robin, which is a little like deciding you want to make David Copperfield the new Batman & Robin.” To Andy Mangels, Gaiman claimed that the script was “not only the worst Sandman script so far, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read. That was sad, especially when it’s something like Sandman which you love and you’ve been close to all these years and then you read this nonsense.” Speaking with the BBC’s Neil Rosser, Gaiman added: “Films carry with them a certain amount of fear because if you say ‘Yes’ to something and you’re wrong, you’re out on your ear, whereas if you say ‘No’ to something, you’re never going to get into trouble, [especially] if everything is always defensible. So you wind up in development with people trying to make things more like things they know, because that is a defensible position: you will probably not get fired for it. Unfortunately that’s why you wind up with films that look like other films.”
Gaiman wasn’t sure what to make of the latest script. “It was very obvious that whoever wrote it had never read any Sandman, and had no understanding of what it was about, and basically had sat somewhere while people said, ‘This is what we want this thing to be,’” he recalls. “It was so offensive and stupid that when the people from Jon Peters’ office phoned me, I found myself being honest with them in a way that you never are with Hollywood people because they don’t like honesty and they don’t quite know how to deal with it. I said ‘I thought it was awful, actually.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the thing we did where we made the Corinthian character the Sandman’s brother, you must have thought that was great.’ And I said, ‘No, that was one of the most deeply stupid things, one of the many awful things...’ and told them for a while how bad I thought it was without repeating myself or stopping for breath for about fifteen minutes, and at the end of it they put down the phone and I thought to myself that’s the last time they’ll ever send me a script or tell me what was going on, and it was indeed. I think they figured I wasn’t a team player and didn’t ‘get’ that whole Sandman thing.”
Farmer responded to Gaiman’s public trashing of his screenplay by contacting the website Coming Attractions with an appeal to Sandman fans: “If any of you are waiting for Mr Gaiman’s esoteric ‘opus’ to arrive on screen intact, forget it,” he wrote. “A hardcore gaggle of fans would no doubt attend, but hardly enough to support the $100 mil budget that would doubtless be required. The best that can be hoped for is a reworking of the source material which retains the concepts, but makes them more accessible to a mainstream audience. I feel that my script was successful in this endeavour; it’s unfortunate Mr Gaiman doesn’t agree.” Suggesting that Gaiman was unlikely to be satisfied with any screenplay which the studio might consider produceable, he added: “I did my best, only to join five or six others in the growing ranks of the ‘Screenwriters of Sandman’ club. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not this troubled project ever gets off the ground. And just to set the record straight,” he concluded, “my version of Sandman didn’t have one fistfight in it.”
Farmer now says that he has “mixed feelings” about the Internet trashing of his script: “I couldn’t blame Sandman fans for being upset; of course this was how they would react. But the personal nature of the attacks was a little un-called for, in my opinion. Gaiman used the word ‘idiot’ in one interview I read, and said that the script was not only the worst Sandman [script], but the worst screenplay of any kind he had ever read. I can of course understand the former statement, but the latter was a little harsh. Taken on its own, the script was intelligent and well written, if I do say so myself. Of course it mangled Sandman; I would never argue that.” Farmer says that he would probably have been hurt more by the attacks if he had believed in the script himself; as it was, “I never really considered it ‘my script’. It was a big monster written by committee, and I just happened to be the schmuck being paid to make the whole thing read like a script and sign my name to it. So while I did not exactly like being called names, I couldn’t very well get on the Internet and say, ‘Hey, you guys are wrong! This thing is great and we didn’t mangle Sandman!’ Because of course, we did.
“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.”
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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.