What They Say:
A compulsively readable journey into the area of movie-making where all writers, directors and stars fear to tread: Development Hell, the place where scripts are written, actors hired and sets designed… but the movies rarely actually get made!
Whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky’s Batman movie starring Clint Eastwood? Why were there so many scripts written over the years for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s fourth Indiana Jones movie? Why was Lara Croft’s journey to the big screen so tortuous, and what prevented Paul Verhoeven from filming what he calls “one of the greatest scripts ever written”? Why did Ridley Scott’s Crisis in the Hot Zone collapse days away from filming, and were the Beatles really set to star in Lord of the Rings? What does Neil Gaiman think of the attempts to adapt his comic book series The Sandman?
All these lost projects, and more, are covered in this major book, which features many exclusive interviews with the writers and directors involved.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Hollywood is practically synonymous with the US movie industry and it has become the source of dreams for many with stars in their eyes since the major movie studios settled there. Many people flock there hoping to see their dreams realized as they strive to achieve their desires for fortune and fame- and maybe not exactly in that order. As such given the movie industries prominence in many culture beyond just the US it isn’t surprising how much effort goes into many of the productions they make (even if some people can say it doesn’t always show in the final product).
There are a number of sources that follow movies from the start of the shooting date through the premier and there is no shortage of people who make a living delivering the information to those ravenous for every nugget from the latest picture they are anticipating. The information from these stories often comes at a rapid pace as different information venues move with what seems to be a frenetic action to scoop the competition. In this brisk environment information can feel out of date within hours, let alone before a story can make print in a magazine to say nothing of the time needed for a book to be researched and published.
Given this reality one might wonder what there is to gain from a book on movies, especially in the age of the internet where information flies fast and furious. The answer to that is that David Hughes has taken a different trail than trying to report on the next hot property- instead he has done a scholarly level of research into a number of titles that were considered “can’t miss” from years past. The properties he presents were ones that set Hollywood rumor mills turning at breakneck pace only to then evaporate into the ether, often leaving a trail of bodies (metaphorically) and hours of blood, sweat and tears from those who strived to bring the titles to the silver screen in its wake.
In his book Mr. Hughes looks at thirteen movie properties whose premise or star names attached seem like they were destined to hit the local cinema. Some of these properties eventually morphed and hit the silver screen in a different incarnation some weren’t so lucky and today exist only as rights, maybe a number of script drafts if someone would look at them and often a fairly sizeable bill still attached to the property from the previous work done. One of the things this book brings forward is just how the committee system that exists in the major motion picture industry holds so much control over pictures, even more than one might have guessed just by observing different “making of featurettes” created about projects either in progress or finished as before a project gets to that point the title has to get past the committee first.
In order to demonstrate just what can happen to a script or production, Mr. Hughes has assembled a wealth of information that follows from the birth of a number of titles to the filing cabinet many of them currently exist in, perhaps waiting for their chance to get made and perhaps just to quietly fade just like the dreams of many of the people who move to Hollywood with the hope of making it big. In order to do this Mr. Hughes has spent what must be an impressive number of hours searching out various pieces and views that the creative talent have dropped from projects that never got much out of the starting blocks and searching to try to get every kernel of knowledge that they have shared over the years- from old industry interviews to tracking down and meeting with no small number of those who worked on the projects and interviewing them for this book.
It is in this research that one of the two pillars of the books strengths really appears. In many cases Mr. Hughes tracks down people who wrote scripts, those who rewrote them-and then those who rewrote the rewrites- to find out what it was they faced while trying to craft these stories as different parties- be it producers, directors, stars or committees each tried to put their stamp on events. Not that the information is limited to just writers as Mr. Hughes appears willing to talk to just about anyone who was willing to go on the record and would have been in a position to know about events. Mr. Hughes also supplements the interviews he has done as he combines his work with interviews given to other sources over the years, a task that may have taken a good deal of time to comb through given that a good deal of these interviews were in the budding years of the internet. As those trying to do research often discover what is available online about certain subject matters isn’t always easy to correlate with items that are not, and interconnection between print and internet was not always as smooth during the early years as it is today.
In order to make his research payoff for those who aren’t either industry insiders or extreme movie junkies he carefully crafts a narrative which allows for the material to read like a story as opposed to a dry, box score like collection of information that the book could have been. This narrative approach opens the book up to a rather wide audience who may not care for any given movie- or any of them at all- whose proposal is chronicled in the book’s pages but who are interested in how projects move forward, or in this case, don’t. The effort of bringing in some of those involved through interviews whether by the author or others on the highlighted project s brings an emotional touch to events that deepens the human aspect behind the stories which otherwise could be missing.
The book isn’t all positives for its work however as a few negatives do creep into the mix, some due to the material itself and some do to the limits of information gathering. The first negative is something that is pretty much beyond the author’s control given the subject matter. Each of the chapters focuses on a different project and while some names that are more famous appear as well as some reoccurring names there are a good deal of names of executives and writers that appear which can make one feel the need to have a score card to keep up. Mr. Hughes does a fairly admirable job in trying to make sure each name gets some bit of info associated with it to try to help it stick in the reader’s mind but this is one aspect where the book likely will appeal more to insiders and those who closely follow the workings of Hollywood studios versus the layman who may pick this up just to see what happened to a feature they once heard about and intrigued them.
The second main issue that comes up is the print choice used is one that is hard to get used to. While it is not “fine print on a contract” size, it is smaller than I am used to seeing in a mass market book. I imagine that was used to keep the overall size of the book down as it does come in at just over 270 pages with its Indexes included but that knowledge doesn’t make the print bigger. This pays off as the book is a bit larger than the standard paperback novel but not to any exceptional degree that will make for much trouble in carrying it around but whose type set may limit its audience somewhat.
The one place that I felt had a bit of a sticking point was one that the author did have direct control over and which, had it been culled a little, might have allowed for some larger print to be used and that is in two chapters in particular. In creating his narrative Mr. Hughes makes wonderful use of interviews with those behind projects for the vast amount of the chapters but in the case of both the forth Indiana Jones film and Tomb Raider the use of direct quotes falls off a bit and it is substituted with a good deal of material from some internet news sites. Now using these for quotes is one thing- and a necessity for a good deal of these cold shelved films but in the case of the two films mentioned the use of them goes further. In these two cases a good deal of rumor and speculation gets mixed into the reporting, including tales of scripts that later turned out to be fake which the other chapters don’t use as much, if at all.
In the interest of full disclosure, one of the sites that is cited often is one of the few movie sites I visit as I like their ability to hunt down news as well as their takes on it and in a different book the inclusion might not stand out. It is just that Mr. Hughes had done such an incredible job with the other chapters in the book hunting down quotes and people closer to scripts to cite that the inclusion of false scripts or scripts summarized by a third party feel like they just don’t play the same way as the work he did elsewhere. It is easy to see why, particularly in Indiana Jones case, direct information might be hard to come by given there are three people(George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford) who likely are the only ones who know completely what went on and who gain nothing about talking much about the stumbles given they in essence are the franchise. In some ways the inclusion of a chapter like the one about a big title like the fourth Indiana Jones felt like something that had to be there given its prominence, but which given the limitations of available info meant it wasn’t going to be as strong as the other chapters. However when one of the biggest complaints about a book is that it is so strong in most places that it makes its few weaknesses seem to really stand out, that in and of itself appears to be a rather bold compliment for the overall body of the work.
In Summary:
Tales from Development Hell is a fantastically well researched book that opens the door to the behind the scenes positioning that takes place when it comes to movies, particularly the kind of movies that will be demanding a large budget to see the light of day. David Hughes does a phenomenal job of assembling the jigsaw like pieces that remain from some major movie ideas that fell apart and then frames the total picture in such a way that one need not be an industry insider of devote follower of the movie making field to appreciate. What the reader will discover in this work is not just the way that the system can grind up original ideas but also that even some of the biggest names in Hollywood can find that they are unable to leverage their industry capitol to get a feature made when the result could be an incredible hit but which also carries incredible risk with the amount of money that it will take to be realized.
Grade: B
