With trailers for Denis Villeneuve‘s new adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s ‘Dune‘ currently exciting movie nerds the world over, it set me thinking about Jodorowsky‘s failed film adaptation of the same novel back in 70’s.
The story behind Jodorowsky‘s attempts to adapt and film the novel are legendary and it led me to thinking of other brilliant movies that never got made.
When I started pondering and researching the topic one film in particular stood out as particularly odd. It hasn’t made my top five, but the stories surrounding Gladiator 2 and a Nick Cave script that brought the film’s lead, Maximus back to life, entertained me no end.
Legend has it Russell Crowe phoned Nick Cave up one evening to offer him the job as writer. Cave‘s natural first question was, “didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?” To which Crowe responded. “yeah, you sort that out“.
So, Cave went to work, wrote a first draft and pitched Crowe the following storyline idea (in Cave‘s words),
“[Maximus] goes down to purgatory and is sent down by the gods, who are dying in heaven because there’s this one god, there’s this Christ character, down on Earth who is gaining popularity and so the many gods are dying, so they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and his followers. In the end you find out that the main guy was his son so he has to kill his son and he was tricked by the gods. He becomes this eternal warrior and it ends with this 20-minute war scene which follows all the wars in history, right up to Vietnam and all that sort of stuff and it was wild. It was a stone-cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made. Let’s call it a popcorn dropper.” Cave wanted to call the project, ‘Christ Killer‘.
Obviously ‘Christ Killer‘ is a rather absurd example, but it’s stories like the one above that amused me enough to read about lots of other bizarre ‘never made films’. Like Salvador Dali‘s, Marx Brothers starring, potential cinema debut, ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad‘, and Ken Russell‘s almost made ‘Dracula‘ which, rumour has it, began as a ballet, and reimagined the famous count as a philanthropist with a taste for the blood of genius.
So, which films make my Top Five?
Dune — directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
I’ve already mentioned this frequently talked about but never made movie. All the rumours and legends surrounding the project are so mythological a documentary was made about them in 2013 by Frank Pavich. From 1974 through to the early 80’s Jodrowsky tried in vain to get the project off the ground as financial mismanagement, a 14 hour script, and dozens of creative clashes meant it stayed an unmade myth. Pink Floyd were set to write the soundtrack, H. R. Giger, Chris Foss and Jean Giraud worked on set and character design, and everyone from Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Gloria Swanson, through to David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier, and Amanda Lear were set to star in it. One of my favourite stories to come from the documentary is that Salvador Dalí wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history and demanded $100,000 per hour to act in the half a day long movie. Jodorowsky offered to pay him $100,000 per minute, then reduced Dali‘s Emperor scenes so that he’d be needed for no more than 4 or 5 minutes – with his remaining lines spoken by a robot lookalike. A truly bizarre idea maybe, but Dalí agreed to the deal in exchange for being allowed to keep the robotic Emperor for his museum. And the documentary is filled with similar tales. In the end a ludicrously long script, a lack of cash and the sheer overwhelming size of the project saw it shelved, but it’s design ideas live on in films like, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Flash Gordon, Terminator, and The Fifth Element, and in the Jodrowsky and Giraud graphic novel, The Incal.
Napoleon – directed by Stanley Kubrick
I regularly think about what this film could’ve been like. The Shining is one of my favourite movies and the idea of Kubrick and Jack Nicholson teaming up in a Napoleon biopic is a mesmerising proposition. I first heard about the project in Jon Ronson‘s 2008 documentary, ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes‘. In the documentary Ronson manages to gain access to over one thousand of Kubrick‘s film research boxes filled with photos, newspaper clippings, film out-takes, notes, and fan letters. It’s a fascinating documentary and gives you a real taste of the man’s obsessive and meticulous mind. Napoleon was chosen as the project to follow the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, and the director had chosen locations in France and Romania for filming, with the Romanian People’s Army offering 40,000 soldiers and 10,000 cavalrymen to Kubrick for the filming of battle scenes. Jack Nicholson was cast as Napoleon and Audrey Hepburn was Kubrick‘s pick for the character of Josephine. Kubrick was so excited about the project he even went as far as to claim he was aiming to create the best movie the world had ever seen. In the end the film was sadly shelved due to the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of Sergei Bondarchuk‘s epic War and Peace in 1968, and the commercial failure of Bondarchuk‘s Napoleon-themed film Waterloo in 1970.
Heart of Darkness — directed by Orson Welles
Back in spring 1939, long before Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now and a two years prior to Orson Welles‘ debut movie, Citizen Kane, Welles tried to turn Joseph Conrad‘s novella into his first feature film. A year earlier he’d freaked out America with his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and shortly after that he’d already aired a live radio production of Heart of Darkness. So, how close did he get to filming Conrad’s ‘unfilmable’ book? Well, the script was near enough finished and RKO Pictures had approved the project, so the money was there. The film had been cast (Welles would play both Marlowe and Kurtz), the famous composer Bernard Hermann was onboard to write the score and the cast had started rehearsals. Locations had been found, sets and costumes designed and storyboards started, but World War Two scuppered things. RKO halved the budget and Welles temporarily continued on regardless but the money dried up and the project ground to a halt. Welles even had a tagline for the film, “You’re not going to see this picture—this picture is going to see you.” If only.
Ronnie Rocket — directed by David Lynch
One of the films I was planning to feature in this list, Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis looks like it might be getting made nearly 20 years after it was shelved, and maybe, just maybe David Lynch‘s oft talked about sci-fi film, Ronnie Rocket will join it one day. Lynch started work on Ronnie Rocket after the success of his 1977 film Eraserhead. Sadly Lynch wasn’t able to raise the funds to finance the project and went on to direct 1980’s The Elephant Man instead. The script follows the story of a detective seeking to enter a mysterious second dimension, aided by his ability to stand on one leg (so far so Lynch). Only strange landscapes of odd rooms, the mysterious ‘Donut Men’ and a threatening train stand in his way. A parallel story concerns Ronald d’Arte, a teenage dwarf, who suffers a surgical mishap and is reliant on being regularly plugged into an electrical supply – this dependence grants him an affinity over electricity which he uses to produce music and/or cause destruction. He renames himself Ronnie Rocket and becomes a rock star. It’s an utterly bizarre premise and one you feel only Lynch could really pull off. Many of the traits and cinematic elements associated with Lynch were present in the project, including industrial design, the supernatural, 1950s popular culture and physical deformity, and the film was going to be Lynch‘s first foray into colour. He intermittently pursued the project until the early 1990’s and many people have seen the script and waxed lyrical about how great it could’ve been. In fact, many still think, someday it’ll finally make it onto the big screen. Here’s hoping.
Kaleidoscope – directed by Alfred Hitchcock
In 1966, in the latter years of his career, following the release of his political thriller, Torn Curtain, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, Alfred Hitchcock was grumpy. The film had taken a critical drubbing and hadn’t performed well at the box office either, with many saying it was old fashioned and tired. Hitchcock fancied a change in direction and brought in his friend, Benn Levy (who’d written the script for his 1929 film Blackmail) to write a story about a necrophiliac serial killer in New York City who lures women to their death. Hitchcock had wanted to shoot a black-and-white movie in New York City packed with gritty violence and horror. Movie chiefs and producers who he’d told about the script told him not to do it as it risked ‘ruining his brand’, as did his friend François Truffaut who found it too disturbing for his tastes. Hitchcock eventually listened and shelved the project, moving onto 1969’s espionage thriller, Topaz, and his gritty New York murder flick never got made. Shame.
That’s my five – what have I missed?
