WELCOME TO DEVELOPMENT HELL

“Trying to make a movie in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

— Douglas Adams

This is not the book I set out to write. Originally, I planned a kind of mainstream version of my earlier book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, covering some of the best unproduced scripts in recent Hollywood history. However, like so many movie-related projects before it, a degree of ‘Development Hell’ crept in, which turned this book into something else entirely. I already knew that the stories behind many unmade movies were more interesting than the movies themselves would ever have been. What I also discovered was that some of the films which suffered most in development did eventually get made — albeit with varying results — and the stories behind those projects are, to me, just as fascinating. Thus, as far as this is book is concerned, the development process was a positive experience — which is more than can be said for the various case studies it documents.

Why do so many Hollywood films go into development, only to wind up in Hell? What is this place to which so many promising-sounding projects and perfectly serviceable scripts seem to be banished, many of them never to be heard from again?

To understand the concept of Development Hell, one must first understand what development is. Producer Jane Hamsher, whose credits include Natural Born Killers and From Hell, has described development as follows: “The writer turns in a script. The producers and studio executives read it, give the writer their ‘development’ notes, and he goes back and rewrites as best he can, trying to make everyone happy. If it comes back and it’s great, the studio and the producers will try and attach a director and stars (if they haven’t already), and hopefully the picture will get made.”

That’s development, in theory. In practice, it’s more like this:

1. The writer turns in a script so unutterably perfect they would stick pens in their eyes sooner than change a single syllable of it.
2. The producer or studio executive, too busy/bored/illiterate to read the script for themselves, sends out for ‘script coverage’ — advice on the potential of the script from a professional script reader. If this doesn’t instantly lead to the script being junked and the writer being fired and replaced — either by a younger, hotter, cheaper model (a ‘tyro’), or an older, more experienced and more expensive one (a ‘veteran’) — the writer will be given ‘notes’. “Everybody gives writers notes,” says screenwriter Richard Friedenberg (Dying Young, A River Runs Through It), “[even] the garbage man. And the notes always conflict.”
3. If sufficiently encouraged to do so, the producer/executive might then actually read the script. “This is perfect,” he (or, one time in a thousand, she) might say. “Who can we get to rewrite it?” Then, in order to justify their own on-screen credit/exorbitant salary/job title/parking space, they will throw their own ideas into the mix or, more commonly, take ideas out. “In Hollywood, ideas are anathema,” says screenwriter-producer Gary Goldman (Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Minority Report), “and the bigger the budget, the more forbidden they are.”
4. The writer then scurries away to rewrite their magnum opus, doing their best to incorporate all the different, conflicting notes, and resubmits the script for approval.
   Steps 1 through 4 are now repeated continuously, with the script continually evolving — and, in rare cases, improving — until finally someone decides it’s good enough (though probably not quite as good as the first draft) to make into a film...
5. This latest draft of the script is sent out to actors and directors, in the hope that it will attract one with sufficient clout to actually get it made. Interested directors — who may be attached to up to a dozen projects at a time, in the hopes that a studio will eventually give one of them a ‘green light’ — will almost certainly want a rewrite, to incorporate twenty-minute tracking shots, elaborate set-pieces, thousands of extras, impossible locations, etc., any of which can add a couple of zeroes to the budget the producer has in mind. Interested actors will almost certainly want a rewrite, to make their scenes larger, their character more heroic, their journey more arduous, their dialogue more, well, you know, gooder — even (or especially) if it means stealing the best lines from other characters. In other words, as one veteran screenwriter puts it, “tweaking a draft to better suit a star who’s expressed interest, only to have said star drop out of the project.” Since the desires of the studio, producers, director and actors are usually mutually exclusive, all of them will blame the writer, who will be fired and replaced by a new writer... taking the whole process back to stage 1.

That’s Development Hell.

The case studies outlined in this “updated and expanded” Second Edition could hardly be more varied. There’s detailed coverage of such famously unproduced films as Crusade, ISOBAR, Smoke & Mirrors and The Hot Zone. An exploration of early, ill-fated attempts to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen. An examination of how promising scripts for Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake and the Tomb Raider movie devolved through development into the crushing disappointments they became. The bizarre true story of Total Recall’s fifteen-year development, an epic gestation almost matched by its putative sequel... Rejected scripts and storylines for the fourth Indiana Jones film and the fifth Batman film. The various Howard Hughes projects which crashed and burned as soon as The Aviator took off. A brand new chapter detailing superstar directors James Cameron and Roland Emmerich’s involvement in the proposed Fantastic Voyage remake. And more.

Not wanting to repeat any of the films covered in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, I have left out the tortuous development of, for instance, Superman, Silver Surfer and The Fantastic Four — but that book is still available – and, indeed, recently revised and updated – and besides, the sorry tale of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman more than makes up for it.

In covering these stories, I have tried not to editorialise, to pass judgment on the content of the scripts themselves. If I naturally favour the writer in most instances, that is only to be expected, since I am one myself. Indeed, I believe that my commitment to the project is illustrated by the fact that several of my own screenplays are currently rotting in Development Hell – as detailed in the final chapter, also new to this Second Edition.

At least this book made it out alive.

David Hughes

September 2011