Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  “Back at the building her father built, there’s some sort of construction going on and the secret magic chamber where Kendall stuck Morpheus is found and blown up, releasing Morpheus. And here’s where things really go wrong, since the character that is released is a fairly indiscriminate killer with no real power of any kind. He beats some people up, jumps off something, gets hurt, and gets taken to the hospital. Morpheus. Lord of Dreams. Gets taken to a hospital after yelling tripe like, ‘As though your puny weapons could harm Morpheus! The lord of sleep! The Sandman!’” (Farmer subsequently contacted the website Comics 2 Film to deny the claim: “The horrible line ... has NEVER been typed by the fingers of yours truly,” and declare that “this was not at all the tone of my script for Warners.”)

  “Well, of course the hospital that Morpheus is brought to just happens to be the same one Rose is in,” Moriarty continued, “and suddenly we’re in lame Terminator 2 rip-off country, with Morpheus going to look for Rose, and the Angel appearing again to save her. The twist here is that Morpheus is trying to kill Rose to save the world, while the Angel is actually The Corinthian, Morpheus’ brother, who has bet Lucifer, their other brother, that he can find the icons of Dream’s office first. Whoever gets them before the year 2000 wins. If neither does, then Lucifer takes over the earth for torture, misery, sorrow, yadda, yadda, yadda. Really. That’s really the story. And the rest of the film’s just a dumb action film with these two fighting over and over, and with them beating up people to get the various items. The ruby’s in a safe in a pawn shop. The sand’s in the study of Rose’s house. And the helmet? Well... giggle, giggle... dare I say it? It’s hidden inside Rose!”

  Perhaps understandably, Moriarty took umbrage at what he saw as the wholesale reinterpretation — or, at best, misunderstanding — of Gaiman’s magnum opus. The Corinthian and Lucifer as Morpheus’ brothers? A character called Love as his sister? And an ending in which it was all just a dream? “Gaiman never, never cheated us like that. Even if something happened in a dream, it mattered. It counted. That’s the whole point. Our dream lives and our waking lives are one and the same. One affects the other. Gaiman made the point over and over, and Farmer has ignored it utterly.” Although Farmer had created a ‘nightmare plague’ loosely based on the ’24 Hours’ issue of Preludes & Nocturnes, Moriarty dismissed the idea as “nothing but a bunch of pointless atrocities without moral heft or payoff.” Overall, he added, “[Farmer] misses everything that makes the original work so unique, so special, so brilliant.”

  Gaiman agreed, describing Farmer’s script as “the worst one yet. It was just sort of nonsensical, poorly written trash,” he told the Philadelphia City Paper. “These are not people who particularly care about Sandman,” he added. “They want it to be the new Batman & Robin, which is a little like deciding you want to make David Copperfield the new Batman & Robin.” To Andy Mangels, Gaiman claimed that the script was “not only the worst Sandman script so far, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read. That was sad, especially when it’s something like Sandman which you love and you’ve been close to all these years and then you read this nonsense.” Speaking with the BBC’s Neil Rosser, Gaiman added: “Films carry with them a certain amount of fear because if you say ‘Yes’ to something and you’re wrong, you’re out on your ear, whereas if you say ‘No’ to something, you’re never going to get into trouble, [especially] if everything is always defensible. So you wind up in development with people trying to make things more like things they know, because that is a defensible position: you will probably not get fired for it. Unfortunately that’s why you wind up with films that look like other films.”

  Gaiman wasn’t sure what to make of the latest script. “It was very obvious that whoever wrote it had never read any Sandman, and had no understanding of what it was about, and basically had sat somewhere while people said, ‘This is what we want this thing to be,’” he recalls. “It was so offensive and stupid that when the people from Jon Peters’ office phoned me, I found myself being honest with them in a way that you never are with Hollywood people because they don’t like honesty and they don’t quite know how to deal with it. I said ‘I thought it was awful, actually.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the thing we did where we made the Corinthian character the Sandman’s brother, you must have thought that was great.’ And I said, ‘No, that was one of the most deeply stupid things, one of the many awful things...’ and told them for a while how bad I thought it was without repeating myself or stopping for breath for about fifteen minutes, and at the end of it they put down the phone and I thought to myself that’s the last time they’ll ever send me a script or tell me what was going on, and it was indeed. I think they figured I wasn’t a team player and didn’t ‘get’ that whole Sandman thing.”

  Farmer responded to Gaiman’s public trashing of his screenplay by contacting the website Coming Attractions with an appeal to Sandman fans: “If any of you are waiting for Mr Gaiman’s esoteric ‘opus’ to arrive on screen intact, forget it,” he wrote. “A hardcore gaggle of fans would no doubt attend, but hardly enough to support the $100 mil budget that would doubtless be required. The best that can be hoped for is a reworking of the source material which retains the concepts, but makes them more accessible to a mainstream audience. I feel that my script was successful in this endeavour; it’s unfortunate Mr Gaiman doesn’t agree.” Suggesting that Gaiman was unlikely to be satisfied with any screenplay which the studio might consider produceable, he added: “I did my best, only to join five or six others in the growing ranks of the ‘Screenwriters of Sandman’ club. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not this troubled project ever gets off the ground. And just to set the record straight,” he concluded, “my version of Sandman didn’t have one fistfight in it.”

  Farmer now says that he has “mixed feelings” about the Internet trashing of his script: “I couldn’t blame Sandman fans for being upset; of course this was how they would react. But the personal nature of the attacks was a little un-called for, in my opinion. Gaiman used the word ‘idiot’ in one interview I read, and said that the script was not only the worst Sandman [script], but the worst screenplay of any kind he had ever read. I can of course understand the former statement, but the latter was a little harsh. Taken on its own, the script was intelligent and well written, if I do say so myself. Of course it mangled Sandman; I would never argue that.” Farmer says that he would probably have been hurt more by the attacks if he had believed in the script himself; as it was, “I never really considered it ‘my script’. It was a big monster written by committee, and I just happened to be the schmuck being paid to make the whole thing read like a script and sign my name to it. So while I did not exactly like being called names, I couldn’t very well get on the Internet and say, ‘Hey, you guys are wrong! This thing is great and we didn’t mangle Sandman!’ Because of course, we did.

  “The only time I countered anything was when I read an angry review of the script on a popular film-gossip site that I won’t honour by naming. The reviewer ranted on and on about how stupid it was, and how stupid I was for having created it. Then, to demonstrate how bad it was, he included the first page. And guess what? I had never seen that page before. It was obviously a script written by a fan-boy or something, that had been circulated on the Internet as the ‘official’ Warner Bros script. So I tried to set the record straight, but by the time I stumbled across this site the controversy had already died down, anyway.”

  Following the Internet backlash, little was heard from the producers. “I think right now they’re licking their wounds,” Gaiman told Andy Mangels. “They got laughed at rather more heartily than they expected for their last idiot script.” As Farmer recalls, “A few weeks went by with the buzz that it was about to go into pre-production, then I got a call saying they were going to look for another writer, with no explanation why. Later I realized it was probably due to the Internet reaction — which is a silly attitude if you think about it. They’re perfectly willi
ng to destroy the source material and piss off the fans, but if the fans find out about it ahead of time, they pull the plug. There was also some talk about an option on the DC source material coming up, so the idea was in the air that Gaiman had pulled it somehow. But I never found out if that was indeed the case.” Gaiman, for the record, denied this possibility. “Warners own Sandman outright; always have done,” he told Ain’t It Cool News. “DC Comics owned all rights back in the days when I signed the original contract with them. Obviously Roger [Avary] couldn’t have taken the rights away to shop around. Nor could I.”

  For Farmer, in addition to earning him a great deal of money and — for a time, at least — kudos from the producers who had hired him and the studio which paid him, his involvement with the Sandman project also taught him a valuable lesson. “If someone hires you to write something, then presumably they think you can write better than they can; otherwise they’d just do it themselves,” he points out. “So, rather than do what you’re told, you’re far better off doing what you believe is best. Had I done that with Sandman, I might still have created a version that didn’t get produced, but at least I would have kept my personal dignity intact. Because at the end of the day, the only one who’ll get the blame for the script is the writer. Sandman was a project that no studio should have tried to do,” he adds. “It was doomed to fail. Now, after all is said and done, everyone involved in that failure can simply say, ‘It was Farmer’s fault.’ In hindsight, it’s clear that this was the sole purpose for which I was hired.” In other words, he says, “Live and learn.”

  Following the Farmer débâcle, two years passed before anything of substance emerged regarding the Sandman project, although for a time the Internet was rife with casting speculation, mostly from fans. “They always have ideas for casting,” Gaiman told the website Cold Print. “It’s one of the immutable laws of the universe now — if you get two Sandman fans together in an enclosed space for more than fifteen minutes, one starts saying, ‘So, if you were doing a Sandman movie, who would you have play him?’ And the other would say, ‘Oh, Daniel Day-Lewis.’ And the first one says, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and they go off from there.” Gaiman had already written to Ain’t It Cool News dismissing as “silliness” the rumours that Stand by Me star Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher) had been cast as Morpheus, and noted that when he had last been consulted on the project — during the period of Roger Avary’s attachment — he did not recall the director having named a favourite actor for the role, “although he mentioned a number of people, including Daniel Day-Lewis, David Thewlis and Rufus Sewell as people he’d be interested in. All English actors.” As ever, Gaiman refused to be drawn on his own dream casting, although he did talk to actress Fairuza Balk (The Craft) about the possibility of an adaptation of his Sandman spin-off comic book miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living. Gaiman, thinking that he may want to direct the film himself, even made a practice run with a short film based on a story by his Books of Magic collaborator, artist John Bolton.

  It was not until the dawn of the new Millennium that a new screenwriter became attached to the Sandman project. David J. Schow was one of the revolutionary horror writers to have emerged around the same time as Clive Barker, and who, along with John Skipp, Craig Spector, Ray Garton and others, was part of the ‘splatterpunk’ movement which tore away the last taboos in horror, writing the kind of works that made James Herbert look like Barbara Cartland. When he turned to screenwriting in the early 1990s, one of his first assignments was adapting J. M. O’Barr’s tragic comic book The Crow for director Alex Proyas. Says Schow, “I was approached by Brian Manis of Peters Entertainment in June of 2000. He had several script drafts and a whole raft of treatments, all in pursuit of what the studio wanted, which was ‘a more commercial approach’ [to the material]. What that means, who can really say? I immediately contacted Neil Gaiman to get his pre-approval, or at least his sanction, for any damage I might wreak on his creation, and Neil basically said, ‘You’re free to try anything you want.’ He insisted that I read the Avary-Elliott-Rossio draft and made sure I received ‘the whole of The Sandman’ — ten books. That was my first exposure to the material.”

  Schow received no notes from the producers prior to commencing work on his ‘pitch’. “I was left pretty much to free-range,” he says. “In retrospect, I realise this was because they had a number of writers working on a number of approaches simultaneously, which isn’t uncommon.” As well as getting up to speed on ten volumes of The Sandman comics, Schow undertook what he calls a “breakdown read” of an undated draft of an earlier Sandman script credited solely to Elliott and Rossio. The draft was not bad, he felt, “just diffuse — it tried to cram in too many characters and incidents from the source book. It seemed arcane, mannered, and discursive, with no actual characters until about halfway in.” In addition, he felt that the script suffered from a problem endemic to comic book adaptations: a pressing desire to tell the ‘origin’ story. “Ever since Superman and Batman established the ‘template’ for [comic book] adaptations,” he observes, “studios have become obsessed with ‘origin’ stories they hope to parlay into series franchises. Well, in most endeavours, the origin buries the story. Story becomes secondary and, voilà, no franchise. This has happened more times than I can count. So if The Sandman was to follow the origin-story route, I felt the origin had to be secondary, or better yet, left for another movie. If the first movie is confusing, or no good, there won’t be a franchise. I think the emphasis on the Sandman’s origin is what jumped the script off the rails in the first place.”

  Schow’s approach was to tell a more focused story. “Face it, the source material ran to nearly a thousand pages,” he says. “So I reduced the players, basically, to four: Sandman, Death, Corinthian, and a normal human character I invented, named Grace, who suffers from every sleep disorder known to science. Grace’s mother was essentially Rachel from the comic, and her link to Sandman. She’s also blood-linked to Corinthian, hence, all kinds of conflict. Once Grace and Sandman are paired up, we experience the horrible wrongness of Corinthian, we quest for the recovery of the Sandman’s power objects, we visit Hell, we meet The Endless, and Sandman battles Corinthian in the dream realm, then the fight slops over into the real world.”

  For Schow, equally important to doing justice to the story, and Gaiman’s writing, was to capture the tone of the comic book. “The triumph of the comic is its melancholy tone, its atmospherics, its emotional resonance,” he explains, “not the chapter-and-verse on who came from where. I wrote for this tone. Corinthian is turning all the world’s dreams into nightmares, and needs to drive Grace to suicide to accomplish his programme. Sandman must regain his lost tools and reinstate himself as one of The Endless. He’s even forced to sleep like a normal human, in order to gain access to the dream realm, and this moment of frailty, of course, undoes him. Grace has to find Sandman in the dream realm, basically, without a map. But the rules of The Endless have only caused Sandman suffering and grief. Grace tells him, ‘Don’t save the world. Save me.’ And, wham — third act. It was very bleak, but uplifting in the way of a single candle flame in darkness. I could tell you more,” he adds with glee, “but you would be driven totally insane.”

  Schow worked on his treatment for a month, between June and July 2000. “I didn’t write a script,” he says. “I wrote two fleshed-out and fairly detailed treatments. Then, game over. And I was never paid a dime.” After that, he says, “It descended back into the dream realm-type limbo where it remains to this day, because there is no Sandman — at least, not one powerful enough to rescue all of us from studio executives.” Despite the lack of a screenplay commission, Schow looks back fondly on his month in the dream realm. “I loved twisting and turning Neil’s clay,” he says, “and still think it would make a great movie. And I hope Neil does, too.”

  Gaiman, however, was not so sure. “I couldn’t quite see why they got him to do what they did, having seen his ou
tline,” he says. “The powers that be had already thrown out the Jon Peters/William Farmer script and plot approach and decided (at the time) to go back to the Avary draft, so I suspected that Dave Schow was just an attempt by the Jon Peters people to prove that their approach really would work.”

  A year after Schow’s brief sojourn with the project, the website Universo HQ quoted Gaiman as saying that he had received another outline “for another [version of the] movie a lot like the really bad one. It’s always the same. They want a love interest now, for the Sandman. They want the Corinthian to be the big bad guy. He’s like the Sandman only more powerful. And they want them to fight, and for the Corinthian to menace to kidnap his girlfriend. It’s just stupid.” Little has been heard of the stalled Sandman project since what Gaiman has described as “the strange, sad, Development Hell morass that Jon Peters has thrown it into... With any luck it will remain there forever. I would much rather that a Sandman movie were never made, than that a bad Sandman movie was.”

  If Sandman is ever granted a reprieve from Development Hell, Gaiman has said, “I just desperately hope that it’s a good movie. I don’t have any control over it, so I’d much rather keep it at a distance and keep my fingers crossed.” Perhaps, he has suggested, Sandman’s destiny lies on the small screen. “I would love Sandman as a television series. I think it would be wonderful. But I don’t think that it will ever happen. They have been doing these drafts of the script and they have been getting worse and worse and they have fired anybody who did have a clue. My own hope is that some time in my lifetime you’ll get a director who loved Sandman and wants to make it, in the same way that Sam Raimi made Spider-Man or Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings.”