Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  said Broyles. Thus, when Captain Davidson escapes the planet of the apes at the climax of the story and returns to Earth, he finds that apes now rule the planet. It was cool, but it didn’t make a lick of sense. “Can I explain the Planet of the Apes ending? No,” admitted Tim Roth, who played General Thade. “I’ve seen it twice and I don’t understand anything.” Commented Broyles, “The ending [should] be viewed in proportion to the rest of the movie, not as some huge, big pay-off, but as fitting with the story itself.” “I thought it made sense. Kind of,” Helena Bonham Carter told Total Film. “I don’t understand why everyone went, ‘Huh?’ It’s all a time warp thing, isn’t it? He’s gone back and he realises Thade’s beat him there. Everyone’s so pedantic,” she added. “You start bringing logic to an ape film, it’s always dodgy.”

  If audiences had difficulty getting their heads around the ending, trying to make sense of Burton’s explanation would prove equally tricky. “Let’s say Fox wants to make another movie. If I explain this ending, it kind of screws up other things. It’s thought out enough to where it could be explained, but if I want to start explaining it, it might damage things. Even not wanting to do another movie, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for somebody else that might. So I can just say that it’s been thought out, there’s a thought to it, but... you can figure some things out through the film, but... Part of what happens is... Part of it for me was ending up on an image that has a big question mark on it. Sometimes I like to do something, and I think it’s sometimes as a reaction to other things... To me, somebody going back and landing in a place he thinks he’s at, and then finding out he’s not there, that to me is logical. There’s a logic to that. There’s less logic to exactly know what he’s going back to, so I actually had no problem... I’m not quite sure what people were responding to because I had no problem with the ending. There were several elements that needed to happen, one of them was an image I had of complete reversal, which I felt was somehow weird and compelling to me, so if they do another movie, the movie is about sort of finding things out, sort of...”

  Burton’s view proved quite prophetic: within five years, Fox was developing a new Planet of the Apes film which was neither a sequel nor another re-imagining, but a prequel to the entire story, based on an imaginative pitch by husband and wife screenwriting team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the latter best known as author of the smash hit The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). “Rick has always kept a file of articles and ideas to look at for inspiration,” Silver told the Planet of the Apes fan site The Forbidden Zone, “and when we were in between projects, in 2006, Rick had some articles about chimps that had been raised as humans at home, and how that had

  always come to trouble, for the chimps and the humans. He knew there was some kind of thriller there, and all of a sudden he had this light-bulb moment, and he said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Planet of the Apes!’ He had an idea to re-boot Planet of the Apes... and he started talking about this chimp raised at home as if he was a little boy, and before we knew it, we were both in love with this little chimp named Caesar.” Jaffa and Silver had no idea of Fox’s plans for the Planet of the Apes franchise, but pitched the bare outlines of the idea to their friend, Fox executive Peter Kang, who pitched it to president of production Hutch Parker. Jaffa and Silver subsequently wrote two years’ worth of drafts, before Scott Frank, screenwriter of three Fox films (Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix and Marley & Me), came aboard as director. “We did two drafts for Scott,” says Jaffa, “and then he told Fox he’d like to take a crack at the script. So then he went off and did a draft as writer-director, and that subsequently did not work out and they moved on and ultimately came back to us. We brought the story back to where it was before Scott started writing.”

  Without realizing it, Jaffa and Silver had set themselves a breathtakingly ambitious goal: to tell the origin story of the entire Planet of the Apes franchise, primarily by dealing with the two key questions: firstly, where did the intelligent, talking apes come from; secondly, where did all the people go? “We said, ‘Let’s look at what’s going on in the world right now in terms of culture and science, that certain dominoes could line up, and if they should touch each other in just the right way, apes would take over the planet. And let’s try to tell that story, but also use the Planet of the Apes mythology to do that.” Directed by Rupert Wyatt, best known in his native England for well-received prison drama The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes1 tells the story of Will (Academy Award nominee James Franco), a scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, who injects Caesar, a baby chimpanzee, with an experimental serum, unwittingly sparking a chain of events which unleashes an army of intelligent apes on San Francisco. Although the film bore superficial similarities to certain events from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Jaffa and Silver claimed this was coincidental. As Jaffa explained to Entertainment Weekly, “We laid out the story and pitched the idea to Fox, and had gotten hired, and okayed to write and produce this thing. It was at that point we went back and started studying the old movies. We already had the

  movie laid out. I think some of the connections to Conquest are on purpose,” he added, “but others are coincidental. ‘Unlikely character becoming a leader and leading his people to freedom’ — it’s also a Moses story.”

  In the run-up to its release on 7 August 2011, Fox predicted that Rise of the Planet of the Apes would gross somewhere in the neighbourhood of $35 million in its opening weekend; as it turned out, the film vastly exceeded the studio’s expectations, grossing nearly $55 million — and almost the same again the following weekend. A sequel to the prequel was not only likely, but certain. “When we started this,” Silver told Entertainment Weekly, “we knew that this movie would stand on its own, and we designed it that way. But... we pictured a trilogy that would start with this movie. We definitely have ideas for where the sequel — plural, where the sequels — would take us.”

  ______________

  1 The original title, Rise of the Apes, was changed in the run-up to release, as Fox felt audiences may not realize it was intended as part of the Planet of the Apes franchise.

  CAST INTO MOUNT DOOM

  Paths not taken on the road to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings

  “When Gandalf is vanquished, the text is ‘He fell beyond time and memory’. We puzzled about how you put that on film.”

  — director John Boorman on his proposed adaptation

  “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With these words, impulsively scribbled on a piece of paper by thirty-eight year-old Oxford languages professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the greatest fantasy epic in the history of literature was born. Although The Hobbit, as the resulting story would eventually be titled, was written largely for Tolkien’s own children, it found its way to publisher Allen & Unwin, and appeared in 1937. It sold well; well enough that Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel. Thirteen years later, ‘J.R.R.’ Tolkien, renowned as a perfectionist and self-professed procrastinator, was ready to deliver it. “My work has escaped from my control,” he wrote to his publisher in 1950, “and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” Its title was The Lord of the Rings.

  It was a further four years before Allen & Unwin finally published the book, an epic saga set in a fictional world called Middle-Earth. Divided, much to the author’s annoyance, into three parts entitled The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, the book sold moderately well, particularly for a thousand-page trilogy of hardcover doorstops which, unable to fit comfortably into any existing genre, had invented one all its own. Nevertheless, it did not begin to enjoy the kind of success one can describe

  as phenomenal until the mid-1960s, when Ace Books (home of Philip K. Dick and Tolkien-inspired fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin) and Ballantine published rival editions of the book. By this time, American youth was in the midst of being caugh
t up in hippie culture, and the quiet Oxford don suddenly found his story about hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards selling hundreds of thousands of copies per month, and becoming — almost overnight — required reading for a generation of psychedelic explorers.

  With a vast readership stretching from middle England to the Midwestern United States, one would have expected Hollywood to come knocking on the door of his study, the cigar smoke of a producer mingling with that of Tolkien’s beloved pipe as he signed away the film rights to his masterpiece. In fact, Hollywood had been ahead of the curve, with Hugo award-winning science fiction fan, writer and magazine editor Forrest J Ackerman — the man credited with being the first to abbreviate science fiction to ‘sci-fi’ — approaching Tolkien as early as 1957. Ackerman made his appeal in person, flying to London and taking the train to Oxford. “I had no sooner landed in London than an hour later I was in the drawing room of Professor Tolkien,” he recalls. “There were two young lady fans who went with me. The Professor talked to us with a pipe in his mouth, and holding his head kind of down, and a very thick accent, and when the two girls and I got back on the train we were saying, ‘What did he say? Did you understand anything?’ We only understood about one word in five!” Nevertheless, he adds, “He gave me permission for a year to try to find a movie producer for it.”

  Ackerman’s ambitious plan was to make a live-action film, rather than taking the animated approach Tolkien would have preferred. “I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization,” Tolkien wrote to his publisher Rayner Unwin on 19 June 1957, “and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.” Referring to an earlier bowdlerization of the book for a dramatised reading produced for radio by the BBC, he added, “I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC.” Although a writing associate of Ackerman’s, Morton Grady Zimmerman, set to work on a treatment for the proposed film, while production designer Ron Cobb began scouting suitable locations in California, Ackerman found it difficult to interest the few producers he knew in such an ambitious undertaking. “I had gone to school with James Nicholson, who was the president of American International Pictures, and I thought perhaps that he would be interested,” he says, “but the scope was too great for him. I no longer recall just who else I approached, but nobody obviously was prepared to produce it at that time.”

  In April 1958, Tolkien admitted in a letter to Unwin that he was “entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it.” He had recently received Zimmerman’s synopsis of the book, described as a “story-line”, and while Tolkien claimed ignorance of the adaptation process, he did know the difference between a film ‘treatment’ and what he saw as ill treatment. “This document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety,” he wrote, adding that Zimmerman seemed “quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent,” he went on. “He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the [Lord of the Rings] at a great pace, and then constructed his [storyline] from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original.”

  Tolkien, a lifelong philologist, was principally peeved with the constant misspelling of Boromir as ‘Borimor,’ but there were other slights, and overall Tolkien felt “very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original.” Nevertheless, there was one redeeming feature about the whole affair, and it was an obvious one. “I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money,” he wrote, referring to his encroaching retirement, and promising to restrain himself, “and avoid all avoidable offence.” In a letter to Ackerman circa June 1958, Tolkien begged understanding of “the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.” Although hardly an avowed cinemagoer, Tolkien understood the medium well enough to note that “the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of an unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” His commentary on Zimmerman’s synopsis was thorough in scope and condemnatory in tone. “He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.”

  Bryan Sibley, author of a later (and widely acclaimed) BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and the official ‘making of’ books for Peter Jackson’s trilogy, believes that some of Tolkien’s criticism may have been unfair. “The problem was that, because Tolkien was not a regular moviegoer, he didn’t understand the problems of dramatisation,” he told Starlog. “One of his chief criticisms of [the] treatment was that he had arranged the books in chronological order. It’s actually something that you have to do if you’re going to construct a screenplay out of what is essentially a novel.”

  Nevertheless, despite the considerable efforts of Ackerman et al to convince Tolkien that his story was in safe hands, the proposed adaptation withered on the vine, and no firm agreement was ever made. “I think it was just as well,” Ackerman admits, “because it could never have been given the grand treatment that Peter Jackson afforded it.” Ackerman did, however, manage to produce another adaptation of the book. “I edited 200 issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland,” he says, “and the man who produced those issues saw a value in Tolkien. As I recall he had me do a one-shot comic book based on it. I had already created a comic strip character called Vampirella, so he had me create a one-shot on a portion of the Tolkien stories.” There was another, more surprising consolation for Ackerman: a cameo role in Peter Jackson’s early splatter film Braindead, aka Dead Alive.

  Meanwhile, back in Europe, work was underway on an animated adaptation of Tolkien’s earlier work, The Hobbit, thanks to the foresight of producer Bill Snyder, who, in 1964, optioned the rights for a period extending to 30 June 1966, handing the task of adaptation to legendary animator Gene Deitch. “After reading the book, I caught the fever,” Deitch recalled in his autobiography How to Succeed in Animation (Don’t Let A Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!), “and intensively began working up a screenplay... The great sweep of the adventure, the fabled landscapes, and the treasure of fantasy characters, made the story a natural for animation.” Incredibly, Deitch and his writing partner, Bill Bernal, were well into the screenplay when they heard, for the first time, of the existence of The Lord of the Rings. “Having assumed there was only The Hobbit to contend with, and following Snyder’s wish, we had taken some liberties with the story that a few years later would be grounds for burning at the stake,” Deitch admitted. These changes included changing some of the characters’ names, playing fast and loose with the plot — even creating a love interest, a Princess, no less — for Bilbo Baggins. Having read The Lord of the Rings, Deitch and Bernal realised that they were dealing with something “far more magnificent” than The Hobbit, and set about retro-fitting elements from the later works into their script, to allow for a potential sequel. They even conceived a ground-breaking animation method they christened ‘ImagiMation’, which would combine cel-animated figures over elaborate 3D model backgrounds, in the style of some techniques pioneered by animation genius Max Fleischer.

  In January 1966, Deitch was invited to America to make a presentation to 20th Century Fox. “By the time we arrived, however, Snyder had already blown the deal by asking [Fox] for too much money.” Evidently, word of The Lord of the Rings’ groundswell of success had not reached the ears of Fox executives. By the time they did
, Snyder found himself with an ace in the hole: according to the paperwork for the film rights to The Hobbit, all Snyder had to do in order to hold an option, also covering The Lord of the Rings, was produce “a full-colour motion picture version” of The Hobbit by 30 June 1966. Nowhere in the contract did it state that the film must be animated, or feature length, or even produced to a high standard. As a mortified Deitch explained, “All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay — all my previous year’s work — hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within twelve minutes’ running time — one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before 30 June 1966.”

  Marshalling a tiny group of friends and associates — a Czech illustrator named Adolf Born, a composer friend named Vaclav Lidl, and an American narrator, Herb Lass — Deitch worked out a simple storyboard, brought to life with paper cutouts photographed with multiple-exposure visual effects and scene continuity, working directly under the camera. Incredibly, the one-reel film was completed on time, and Deitch arrived in New York with the rough answer print a day ahead of schedule. Snyder had already booked a small projection room in midtown Manhattan, and after a quick test screening, Deitch ran downstairs to stop passers-by, asking if they would mind paying ten cents admission to see a new animated film. “After the screening, the few puzzled audience members were asked to sign a paper stating that on this day of 30 June 1966, they had paid admission to see the full-colour animated film The Hobbit. Thus, Snyder’s film rights to the entire J.R.R. Tolkien library were legally extended, and he was immediately able to sell them back for nearly $100,000. My share of this weazled boodle? Zip.”