by David Hughes
The problem, it seemed, was the one Boulle had foreseen: that there was every chance that a film featuring a principal cast of talking apes might appear ridiculous to a cinema audience. Finally, Jacobs convinced 20th Century Fox’s head of production, Richard D. Zanuck, to let him spend $5,000 on a makeup test, which was filmed on a jury-rigged set on 8 March 1966. “Rod Serling wrote a long, nine-page scene, a conversation between Taylor and Dr Zaius,” Jacobs recalled of the test, directed by Schaffner, and featuring Heston as the misanthropic astronaut Taylor and his Ten Commandments co-star Edward G. Robinson in full ape make-up as the orang-utan science minister Dr Zaius, with a young James Brolin and Linda Harrison — who would later be cast as the mute beauty Nova — as the sympathetic chimpanzees, Cornelius and Zira. “We packed the screening room with everyone we could get ahold of,” Jacobs added, “and Zanuck said, ‘If they start laughing, forget it.’ Nobody laughed. They sat there, tense, and he said, ‘Make the picture.’”
The make-up test had also impressed John Chambers, a former prosthetics designer turned Hollywood make-up artist whose innovative creations had
been seen in Star Trek (Mr Spock’s ears), and John Huston’s film The List of Adrian Messenger (completely disguising the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum for their cameos). “The make-up was crude,” he remarked of Ben Nye’s work for the test, “but they had a semblance of what they wanted. That’s how the concept was started.” Chambers was required to solve a number of problems before filming could begin. Should the evolved apes look like Neanderthal Man, like animals, or somewhere in between? How could the three subspecies in the script — and the various gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan characters — be differentiated? How could masks be made to express the actors’ own facial movements, and handle the voice projection required for sound recording? How could the make-up be applied and removed quickly enough to make filming practical?
While Chambers struggled to solve the make-up problems, the filmmakers continued to reshape the script, initially with Serling, and later with Oscar-winner Michael Wilson, a once-blacklisted screenwriter — originally uncredited on The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia due to his suspected Communist allegiances — who knew all about senseless prejudice. Wilson’s experience at Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings lent authenticity and added poignancy to the tribunal scene, the simian equivalent of a typical ‘kangaroo court’. With each new draft, the story drifted farther from its source novel, largely because Boulle’s depiction of the simians as a technologically advanced race with cars, buildings and helicopters — all re-scaled for primates — required a far larger budget than Fox would allow. “The early designs were of a very high-tech civilisation, which meant you had to design all kinds of special vehicles and buildings and so on,” Heston explained. “And Frank [Schaffner] said, ‘I don’t have enough budget as it is. Why don’t we say it’s a very primitive society, and they use horses and wagons and very primitive buildings?’ And that’s what we did.” Production designer William Creber based his revised concept drawings for the simian community on what he described as “a troglodyte city” carved into mountains in Turkey.
The greatest alteration, however, was the relocation of the book’s action from an alien planet with its own simian civilisation, to a devastated, post-holocaust Earth of the far future, 2,000 years after a nuclear war has wiped almost all traces of mankind from the face of the planet, allowing simians to become the dominant race. The terrible truth would be revealed to Taylor in the last shot of the film, when his journey into the ‘Forbidden Zone’ leads to the discovery of the wrecked Statue of Liberty, half-submerged in the desolate wasteland which is all that remains of New York City, circa 3955 AD. Although
the credit for this devastating idea has been attributed to — or appropriated by — just about everyone involved with the picture, Jacobs claimed that it came to him during an informal development meeting with Blake Edwards at a Burbank delicatessen. “As we walked out, we looked up, and there’s this big Statue of Liberty on the wall of the delicatessen,” he said. “If we never had lunch in that delicatessen, I doubt that we would have had the Statue of Liberty at the end of the picture.” Jacobs further claimed that Boulle thought the twist was “more inventive than his own ending, and wished that he had thought of it when he wrote the book.” Boulle remembered it differently. “I disliked, somewhat, the ending that was used,” he said, referring to perhaps the greatest coup de thèâtre in the history of cinema. “Personally, I preferred my own.”
Premièred on 8 February 1968, Planet of the Apes was a critical and commercial smash, grossing a staggering $26 million — more than four times the production budget of $5.8 million. “It not only grossed enormous numbers, it created a new film genre: the space opera,” Heston said later. “Fantasies set in outer space had long been a staple of the comic strips and Saturday-morning kiddie TV, but had been disdained by Hollywood,” he added, possibly explaining the studios’ initial reluctance to green-light the project. Planet of the Apes endured one of the most prolonged and difficult development periods of any film, only to become one of the biggest successes of the year — and a virtual lifesaver for 20th Century Fox, which, less than a year earlier, had lost a fortune, even by today’s standards, on the epic costume drama Cleopatra. The following year, as the first of four sequels was going into production, Planet of the Apes received two Academy Award nominations, famously beating out the monkey make-up of 2001: A Space Odyssey to earn a special Oscar.
Although a number of reasons were cited for Apes’ across-the-board appeal, it was obvious that the film worked on at least two distinct levels. “Whether by design or accident, [it] had this double appeal,” explained Maurice Evans, who ended up playing Dr Zaius in the film, and returned in the first sequel. “The appeal to youngsters [was] as a pure science fiction film, but it had a message to deliver which apparently communicated very clearly to the adult audience.” But had Schaffner set out to make a sci-fi action adventure with an intriguing premise and an unbeatable twist, or a Swiftian satire with a polemical commentary on the politically turbulent times of the late 1960s? “I had never thought of this picture in terms of being science fiction,” Schaffner asserted, echoing Pierre Boulle’s opinion of his original
novel. “It was a political film.” Indeed, Planet of the Apes can perhaps be viewed as symbolically similar to its most famous image, the Statue of Liberty itself: an uncomplicated political message delivered to a mass audience via a populist medium.
The first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was released in 1970, followed by another in each of the following three years: Escape From the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Two television series followed: Planet of the Apes in 1974 and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes in 1975, by which time the entire concept seemed to have been driven to extinction.
Nevertheless, barely two decades later, Zanuck’s “Make the picture” evolved into a different imperative: to remake the picture. Yet the film which Batman director Tim Burton was to bring to the screen in 2001 originally began not as a remake — or a “re-imagining”, as the spin doctors in 20th Century Fox’s marketing department euphemised — but as a sequel. In 1988, a twenty-one year-old film-maker called Adam Rifkin made a low budget teen flick entitled Never on Tuesday, with cameos by Nicolas Cage, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Although barely released and seen by few, the film so impressed Fox president Craig Baumgarten that he invited the young auteur to pitch anything he wanted to make. Instead, Rifkin pitched something he wanted to remake. “I had always been a huge Planet of the Apes fan,” he says, “and when Craig asked me if I had any ideas for the studio I immediately pitched him on bringing back the Apes. Having independent film experience, I promised I could write and direct a huge-looking film for a reasonable price, like the sequel to Alien.” Although made for a paltry $18 million, James Cameron’s Aliens looks like it cost five
times that sum, and became a huge success for the studio.
Instead of pitching a story which Fox might then ask him to turn into a screenplay, Rifkin took the unusual step of pitching the trailer: “It would open on a barren desert, sand to the horizon. Then a dot would appear in the distance — very Lawrence of Arabia. A craggy narrator would begin telling the cryptic tale of a long forgotten race, decimated by turmoil, strife, war. All the while the dot is getting closer. It’s a shrouded man on horseback. Wearing all black, scarves hide his face from the buffeting sand. Closer and closer he rides, the narrator’s words growing in intensity. Finally, as the storyteller’s words apex with some corny, critical, euphemistic phrase, like “... and now, from out of the sand, they’re back!” the Horseman at that moment would ride into close-up. His horse would rear just as he pulled off his scarf to reveal
the face of a gorilla, bellowing a deafening war cry. The camera would then ascend up over the ape’s head to reveal an army of thousands of apes on horseback charging over the horizon.
Rifkin says that Baumgarten commissioned him to write what amounted to a sequel, “but not a sequel to the fifth film, an alternate sequel to the first film. I had pretty much decided that all anybody really remembered was some random imagery from the first film,” Rifkin explains, “particularly the end scene on the beach. All the other films were just a blur. Fox agreed, and that’s why it was decided to branch the franchise off in the direction that we did.” Rifkin describes his version as “Spartacus with apes. The film would open on the last scene from the first film where Charlton Heston was screaming up at the Statue of Liberty, then fade to black. A card would read: ‘300 years later’. When we would fade up, the ape empire had reached its Roman era. A descendant of Heston would eventually lead a human slave revolt against the oppressive Roman-esque apes. A real sword and sandal spectacular, monkey style.”
“The legend throughout the humans is this one man who came from space,” Rifkin elaborated to Creative Screenwriting magazine, “so our descendant takes on that cause.” At the same time, a power struggle has erupted within the ape empire, with gorillas and chimpanzees hovering on the brink of civil war for dominance of the planet. “The general of the gorilla army stages this coup d’ètat, slaughters a bunch of orang-utans, and takes control of the ape empire politics. In a way,” he added, “Gladiator did the same movie without the ape costumes.” Rifkin says that 20th Century Fox loved the draft. “Fox was dead set on making this movie, and fast. Their marketing department went nuts for the idea of bringing back Apes, which just fuelled Craig’s determination to get it into production as fast as possible.” The studio’s only request was to shorten the draft by ten or so pages, a decision he says was based more on budget concerns than creative ones. “As soon as I was to turn in the cut-down script we were to commence official pre-production. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I couldn’t believe it.” Rifkin was set to direct, with Academy Award-winning make-up man Rick Baker working on the apes, Danny Elfman (Batman) composing the score, “and possibly Tom Cruise or Charlie Sheen to play the young slave. Both were hot young actors at the time and were pretty much neck and neck as far as who would turn out to be the bigger star. I can’t accurately describe in words the utter euphoria I felt at knowing that I, Adam Rifkin, was going to be resurrecting Planet of the Apes,” he adds. “It all seemed too good to be true. I soon found out that, of course, it was.”
Days before the film was to commence pre-production, Craig Baumgarten was “quite unexpectedly and unceremoniously replaced” by what Rifkin describes as “a succession of new studio heads. Though the new heads of the studio didn’t specifically kill the project, the momentum certainly shifted from active pre-production to active development. Many new drafts were commissioned and it seemed for a while like the simple Spartacus parallel that I had originally intended was beginning to lose its focus and shape.” One bone of contention was that, like the original film, Rifkin’s script ended on a pessimistic note. “[Fox wanted] a happy, harmonious ending between apes and humans, this ‘we can all finally live together’ happy ending, which I always thought was a bad idea,” Rifkin told Creative Screenwriting. “I thought it was a little corny, because you want a hopeful ending for the characters you care about, but you still want there to be the tension between the apes and the humans for all the [proposed] sequels.”
As the script went through draft after draft, the hope of Rifkin being allowed behind the camera seemed to fade. “Eventually the script evolved to a place where, though different than the original idea, I actually liked it again. Somehow, through all this development, ideas hatched that otherwise would have never been thought of. I was excited again. But alas,” he says, “it wasn’t meant to be. Eventually, as is so often the case in studio development, my Planet of the Apes just died on the vine. There was no grand deceitful moment, or imposing closed door meeting that put the final nail in its coffin. Trends shift, culture changes, new ideas replace old ones and what once seemed like a great idea to a studio and its marketing department now seemed like old news.” Although he would obviously have preferred to have seen the project through, Rifkin (whose career has since included writing Mouse Hunt and directing Detroit Rock City) says he has no hard feelings: “It was my first studio job, and was a valuable personal and professional experience all the way around. It enabled me to join the Writers Guild and opened other Hollywood doors as well. All in all it was a wonderful project to be a part of, if only for a brief moment.”
It was to be several years before Fox resurrected the idea of remaking Planet of the Apes, this time when Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, who produced Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, became involved. Says Murphy, “I called [Fox executive] Peter Rice, who was and is a good friend of mine, and said, ‘I have to do this. What do I gotta do?’ And he said, ‘You gotta find a director. Why don’t you find somebody interesting, like Sam Raimi?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I don’t know how to get to Sam Raimi, and I’m
not sure he’s the right guy anyway.’ And he said, ‘Well, fuck, why don’t you walk down the hall and ask Oliver?’ So I walked down the hall and asked Oliver... and he didn’t say ‘No.’” He didn’t exactly say “Yes,” either. According to the account in Jane Hamsher’s book Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade, Stone may not have known what he got himself into. “I imagine the conversation going something like this,” Hamsher wrote. “‘So, Oliver, Planet of the Apes,’ says Don. ‘What about it?’ says Oliver. ‘Do you like it?’ says Don. ‘Um, sure,’ says Oliver... ‘So, if I could get us involved, you’d like that, huh?’ says Don. ‘Huh? Sure, Don, whatever,’ says Oliver.” According to Hamsher, Rice responded by saying that he would only be interested if Stone would direct. “What we don’t want is an expensive executive producer.” Murphy said to leave it to him.
Before long, a top-heavy meeting was arranged at the offices of Stone’s production company, Ixtlan, with everyone present from Fox president of production Tom Jacobson, and going down through the ranks of vice presidents all the way to Rice — on whose shoulders the whole experience (not to mention his future career) was resting. What Stone said first caught everyone by surprise. “I watched the original movies again a couple of nights ago, and they were awful,” he told a stunned boardroom. “I’m only here because of Don Murphy. You should talk to him.” As Hamsher recalled, “[What followed] was the most dreadful silence I’ve ever heard in a room. Oliver had clearly gotten wind of all of Don’s shenanigans in the process, and was now hanging him out to dry.” Murphy apparently did his best to encourage the executives on the basis of marketing potential merchandising tie-ins, McDonald’s Happy Meals and the like, but it was abundantly clear that there was no idea, no pitch, to back up the generalisations and jargon. “The collective embarrassment level in the room was quantumly higher than anything I’ve ever registered before in my life,” Hamsher went on. “When suddenly, Oli
ver seemed to tune into something.”
Stone — who had mixed politics and science fiction in the television series Wild Palms, and written an unproduced adaptation of Alfred Bester’s sci-fi novel The Demolished Man — had apparently become intrigued by the prospect of time being circular, not linear, with no difference between the past and the future. “What if there were discovered cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who held the secret numeric codes to the Bible that foretold the end of civilization?” he wondered. His interpretation of Planet of the Apes would, as he later told Empire, be “a sci-fi movie that deals with the past versus the future. My concept is that there’s a code inscribed in the Bible that predicts
all historical events. The apes were there at the beginning and figured it all out.” Nevertheless, he added evasively, “I don’t want to say too much, except that the stars will be hairy.”
According to Hamsher, Fox thought almost as much of Stone’s ideas as Stone himself did. Thus, wrote Hamsher, “Oliver Stone got Fox to take exactly what they didn’t want on the project — an expensive executive producer. They called the next day and offered him a million dollars to do just that.” When the project was announced in Variety in late 1993, Hamsher sounded more confident than she felt about Stone’s approach. “Oliver’s notion is kind of in the Joseph Campbell-mytho [sic] vein,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s about what a separate, parallel planet might be. He’s reinvented the story with a contemporary scientist going back in time to this simian universe.” Although news that Oliver Stone might direct a new Planet of the Apes spread like wildfire, Murphy says that was never the intention — “he may have led Fox to believe that, so we could do the deal, but no” — and that he only ever intended to executive produce the film. Nevertheless, Hamsher asserts that Stone was enthusiastic about the project. Murphy agrees: “I think Oliver saw there was a very exciting story to be told and a very exciting concept in a very exciting world.” Soon the director was working closely with British-born screenwriter Terry Hayes, who had scripted two Mad Max sequels and Dead Calm, on a brand new screenplay.
