Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  Massett and Zinman were subsequently replaced by Face/Off scribes Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, who worked with Herek developing a new draft, subsequently reviewed by one ‘Darwin Mayflower’ on the website Screenwriters Utopia. “The script opens in Macedonia, 632 BC. Alexander the Great is mad with power: he has an ancient, supernatural breastplate, the Shield of Achilles, that makes him invulnerable. Alexander has begun to kill his own people, to feed the demon-dog Cerberus, and two of his men, Priam and Sophius, decide enough is enough and plot to take him down. They eventually do, with the help of one of Alexander’s consorts, and break the breastplate into three pieces and bury them at the furthest reaches of the earth.”

  Cut to the present day, in which Lara Croft is re-imagined as a Robin Hood-style figure who returns stolen artefacts to their rightful owners — the Shield of Achilles being the subject of her latest quest. “Her frail Uncle Charles Powell hooks her up with the bookish Dr Alexis Toulin, who works for the Greek Ministry of Antiquities. Alexander’s tomb has been found and Alexis fears that the three sections of breastplate, one of which Lara unknowingly found, might end up in the wrong hands (anyone who possesses it is invulnerable, remember).” Lara sets off for Morocco with Dr Toulin, gatecrashing a party taking place above a cave containing the second piece of the breastplate. Ultimately, Mayflower added, “Dr Toulin winds up being a criminal. Her Uncle is in on it, too (he’s dying and wants the breastplate so he can go on living). Lara gets together with the good-guy-she-thought-to-be-bad, [Theo] Rooker. And together ... they track down the Shield of Achilles and try to stop Alexis and his dangerous wife.”

  Mayflower went on to describe Werb and Colleary’s take on Lara herself as “a wonderful contradiction. She’s beautiful but alone; she can speak six languages and knows her mythology like an average person knows his days of the week ... she’s ready to take on any challenge, but won’t accept a man in her life. Lara’s parents died in a plane crash,” he added. “Their bodies were never discovered and their empty mausoleum is like a self-torturing device to remind Lara her life with her parents never had a conclusion. Her butler dramatically tells her she helps find things for people because she’s really looking for her parents.” Unfortunately, he added, “Lara’s problems aren’t dealt with, and she just becomes another piece in the plot-puzzle. The lost-parents rap is also a little stupid: sure, it sucks to never find your parents’ bodies, but she has accepted they are dead, and grieving over finding the mangled corpses of your loved ones isn’t the best activity for a buxom heroine. Lara later runs into — wow! totally by accident! — those dead parents. And it’s once again not a stroke of paint in Lara’s personality, but another plot point.

  “You’re not asking much with a Tomb Raider movie,” Mayflower added. “You want to sit down and see [Lara] kill bad guys, just make it under a gate as it’s closing, and spout some cool one-liners. That the authors couldn’t give us at least that much is both disappointing and baffling.” Although impressed by an early scene which places Lara in an ancient-ruins-themed casino — and another in which Lara is tortured by being tied to a post while centipedes crawl up her body, only to crush one of them with her ample cleavage — Mayflower’s overall disappointment was clear. “There’s just not much going on,” he lamented. “And when it does, it’s Lara in some hackneyed action scene we’ve watched twenty years ago and were just as bored then as we are now.”

  According to de Souza, this draft spent a huge amount of time, “like twenty-eight pages!” in ancient times with Alexander and company, “sort of like The Mummy did before Brendan Fraser even showed up. This drove the studio crazy, because they were negotiating to pay Angelina Jolie a record price to be in a ninety-minute movie, and now at the eleventh hour Herek wanted to take away a third of her time on screen, and replace it with millions of dollars of actors, sets and costumes that were all — essentially — a prologue!” Nevertheless, The Mummy had, against most predictions, proven to be a huge international success for a rival studio, Universal, and it was perhaps unsurprising that Paramount were willing to take the Tomb Raider film in a new direction. In the meantime, however, Herek dropped out to direct Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star, leaving Tomb Raider with a ‘hard’ release date — a target date which a studio has marked out for a particular film’s release, and which it us unwilling to shift — but no director. “It was the worst situation,” de Souza states. “The movie was due out the following summer, so it had to start in September or October of that year. That’s so far into the process, you can’t even shop for directors — even if you say, ‘Who’s available?’ and start interviewing people, that takes six weeks.”

  It was at this point that someone at the studio remembered that British director Simon West, who had made the smash hit Con Air and, for Paramount, The General’s Daughter, was stuck in Development Hell on another Paramount project. West owed the studio a movie, so he would be available relatively cheaply, given that the price for that unnamed film had already been fixed. Thus, says de Souza, “Paramount threw Simon West off a postponed film also on the lot and rolled his deal over to Tomb Raider — a move which, at the time, seemed both wise and efficient.” West, however, did not like the direction the Tomb Raider script was taking. “The old drafts had a lot of ‘Mary Poppins’ representations of England,” he told Premiere. “It was fairly horrendous. I said, ‘Look, I want to change everything but the title and the character.’ I had to come up with it very quickly.”

  “As soon as he was locked into it,” says de Souza, ”he took off his nice guy mask and completely hi-jacked the movie. He says all the right things to get the job, and once he’s in he says, ‘It’s a piece of shit. I could write the script myself.’” Whether West was aggrieved that he had been manoeuvred into directing a potential blockbuster under the terms of an existing deal — meaning that he would not get the kind of payday he expected from a film like Tomb Raider — or whether he genuinely did not like the script, was unclear. In any case, says de Souza, “he demanded he be given an additional paycheck to write his own script, in lieu of the one already in ‘prep’ — mine.”

  West, who had spent more than a year developing a film based on 1960s TV series The Prisoner, made no secret of his initial scepticism at the prospect of taking on Tomb Raider. “Every time it came up I thought that we must really be desperate if we’re looking to video games for film ideas,” he commented. “I was a real prejudiced snob about it. No film based on a video game has ever worked.” Neither did reading earlier drafts endear the project to him. “[One of them] had scenes with people visiting the Queen and drinking tea,” West told Dreamwatch magazine. “It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

  Describing his own vision of Tomb Raider: The Movie as “James Bond on acid” and “James Bond as it should be — slightly sadistic, supercool, with a surreal element,” he said he had read all of the previous drafts, and decided that Massett and Zinman’s was the one he liked best. As a result, West holed up in a London hotel room and bashed out yet another script, which — according to a synopsis posted on Coming Attractions — combined elements of several earlier drafts. “The plot, briefly, involves adventuress/magazine editor Lara Croft’s pursuit of the death mask of Alexander the Great,” the report stated. “The mask was split into three pieces when Alex’s hidden tomb was sealed to protect it from raiders (the closing of the tomb opens the film). The pieces of the mask were spread around the world. Lara unwittingly has one piece of the mask in a relic she takes in her introductory action sequence. The piece comes to her attention when a Greek man named Darius offers to buy the piece and, when she refuses to sell, he steals it. Lara then has to figure out what the piece is and find the other pieces before Darius.

  “Darius wants to find the tomb because Alexander is said to have possessed the Shield of Achilles, which makes its holder invulnerable. Lara makes good use of her family butler, Jeeves, and a reluctant archaeologist friend she once had an affair with, Justin, to hunt down the mask pieces. The movi
e is full of action sequences with Lara finding her way through the tombs with Darius’ men in pursuit... The final showdown is a bit hokey, as a plunge off a cliff ends with Lara saving herself with the shield. The plot is really an excuse for the action scenes, which range from the Middle East to the Khyber Pass to some nifty underwater work. The biggest problem with the movie is that Lara herself does not act particularly sexy and there is no real heat between her and Justin or even her and Darius. It’s very PG in that respect. Fans may like to know that the script does show Lara grieving for her dead, rich parents and has her work as editor of an adventure magazine where she publishes accounts of her exploits. All in all,” the report concluded, “this project needs some more work to make it stand out. Otherwise, it’ll turn out to be just another action flick.”

  Few were surprised when the release date slipped again, this time to the summer of 2001. Perhaps nervous that the studio may tire of their inability to shepherd the film into production, Gordon and Levin called in a series of ‘closers’ — Mission: Impossible 2 scribe Brannon Braga, future Avatar co-screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, and Academy Award nominee Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show) — who continued to massage the script. According to de Souza, Mike Werb and Michael Colleary worked briefly with West, an experience they reportedly described as “horrible”. Says de Souza, “Mike Werb said, ‘The movie’s called Tomb Raider, and there’s no tombs and there’s no raiding,’ and Simon West said, ‘That’s my plan — I don’t want to be obvious.’ Other writers had told me that they would sit in a room with Simon West where they would say, ‘You can’t do that, it ruins the surprise,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want any surprises in this movie — that’s twentieth century. This is a twenty-first century movie. We’re not here to surprise or play games with the audience or shock them or talk about characters and motivation — this is just pure kinetic energy and momentum.’”

  Basically, de Souza adds, “West went back to the scripts that were abandoned, and did a cut and paste and put them all together, and did his own rewriting across the top of it. He invented the storyline about the antediluvian Conan-esque Hyborean Age prehistory ‘triangle of light’ that was made from a meteor, and (with Angelina) added all the father/daughter scenes. Nobody wanted him to do that, but nobody could stop him. The studio was happy [with the script], but he kept saying, ‘I want another rewrite.’ He was driving them crazy.” Lloyd Levin sees it differently. “From a creative point of view, Simon totally turned it around.”

  West worked with Massett and Zinman on yet another draft, delivered in March 2000, keeping the theme of immortality from the ‘Shield of Achilles’ drafts, but replacing it with West’s idea: a search for an artefact called ‘The Triangle of Light’ by the ‘Illuminati’ — a secret order described in the Illuminatus trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson (for whom a newly-introduced character, Wilson, is presumably named). Said Zinman, “When we met with Simon his idea was the sacred shape, and there’s only one sacred shape and that’s the triangle. The trinity, the number three, the pyramids, the Masons, Christianity, the ‘all-seeing eye’ — it’s just naturally there... We wrote in prose form what the mythology was, who the ‘people of the light’ were, what the pieces [of the triangle] were. I’ve got to tip my hat to Simon West,” he added. “He said, ‘Let’s take it out of the known. Let’s make it more mystical and unknown.’ I think it was a wise choice.”

  Despite all these revisions, de Souza says that the script’s basic shape and flavour remained close to his original: “We were still chasing after something Alexander had hidden, and Lara had a love/hate trust/don’t trust relationship with a guy she was travelling with in partnership.” West renamed all the supporting characters, including two held over from the de Souza draft — the cybernetic trainer, JEEVES, and the male lead, Kincaid — which he changed to ‘SIMON’ and ‘West’ respectively. “I thought it revealing that he put the name ‘Simon’ on the robot, which is a mindless drone, and ‘West’ on the character who vacillates,” says de Souza wryly, “because the film demonstrated completely mechanical storytelling, combined with a lot of indecision about which way to go.”

  As rewriting continued, so did the search for someone to fill Lara’s boots. Despite earlier negotiations with Angelina Jolie, an edition of Entertainment Weekly dated 2 March 2000 quoted Simon West as saying that he was looking for an unknown actress to play what he described as the “James Bond of archaeology”, for a June start date. “To some, she’s the perfect woman, though others would say she’s a total male fabrication of what a woman should be,” he added. “We don’t want to ram a Hollywood star into this thing, because Lara is visually [known].”

  West did not reveal how he planned to raise the money for a globe-trotting action movie with expensive set pieces, however, and the following day, Variety reported that Jolie — who was just two weeks away from winning an Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted — was in “final negotations” to play Lara Croft. Tomb Raider fans were divided on Jolie’s casting: some celebrated the idea of an actress as intrinsically sexy and cool as Jolie playing Lara; others were concerned that her off-screen activities — she sported numerous tattoos (including a large one bearing her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s name), and had admitted a proclivity for self-harm and knife wounds inflicted during sex — did not sit well with a game enjoyed by millions of pre-adolescent boys.2

  “It was always Angelina,” West later admitted to Empire. “I mean, Lara sleeps with knives and doesn’t take shit from anybody. That’s A. J. down to a tee.” Nevertheless, it took some time for West to convince Jolie that the role fit her like a tank top and a pair of hot pants. “At first I thought Tomb Raider was a really bad idea,” she told Empire. “Like most people I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be silly and campy, and only based on that little outfit and the body.’ But then Simon and I talked about her, about her relationship with her father, and she became kind of beautiful to me.”

  Certainly, one element of the Tomb Raider deal which may have helped swing the newly-minted Academy Award-winner into the film was the opportunity to work with her father, fellow Oscar-winner Jon Voight, from whom she had been estranged for many years. “It’s taken us a long time to figure out if we could do a project together, for many different reasons,” she said, “and it’s very special. It’s also very scary, because our relationship is very, very similar to these two people, [in that] through my whole life, I’ve followed in his footsteps. And he’s somebody who searches the world for information, different religions, different places, different myths.”

  West went a step further than casting Voight as Lara’s explorer father, as de Souza explains: “One of the things that gave him leverage was she wanted to work with her father, so he said, ‘I’ll put your father in the movie, and I’ll let you write your own scenes with your father.’ So she and her father wrote those scenes they were in together. It shows how stupid everybody is because nowhere in the source material does it say the father’s dead,” he adds. “So if they want the father in the movie, let him be alive in the movie. They could have had a scene like in The Mask of Zorro, where the father dies in the daughter’s arms. Instead, they get the father in the movie the hardest way possible, with all these dream sequences and flashbacks.”

  Despite de Souza’s reservations, regular Ain’t It Cool script reviewer ‘Moriarty’ was impressed by the shooting draft, not least the thematic resonance Massett and Zinman had been aiming for. “This script is first and foremost about Lara coming to some sense of peace with the loss of her father,” wrote Moriarty. “This entire adventure serves only to take Lara to the next step, to get her over this particular pain. Loss informs her every choice in the movie, and it’s one of the things that elevates the material, that gives it some heft and resonance.” As Massett explained, “It was always our intention for Lara to have a connection to the past, to the present, and to how those worlds collided and what that meant. The Triangle of Light held the theme to understand God, or man’s dut
y to understand the nature of Nature itself. That was the theme that came through.” Moriarty also approved of the script’s “nimble wit”, which included a sight gag where Lara, considering the options for her next mission, opens a file containing pictures of Egypt: “Right away, she tosses it aside, a welcome sight for anyone who’s seen the Indy films and the new Mummy.” As for the supporting characters, he thought the Q-like Bryce was an interesting foil for the heroine, noted the effective “sexual energy” between Lara and Alex Marrs, and highlighted her “antagonistic sparring” with the Illuminati villain Manfred Powell.

  “I was surprised by how much I invested in Lara and her father by the end of the film,” he added. “There’s difficult choices that she makes that mark her as a hero of real conscience and strength, rather than just a babe in shorts who’s good at killing thugs. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some talky chick flick by any stretch of the imagination. There’s several great action set pieces... [and] each of them defines Lara or her relationships with Bryce, Powell, Marrs, and even her father. None of them are just action for the sake of it, and that’s what intrigues me most about this film... These set pieces are all built on clever ideas, smart in both text and subtext. Lara’s got a touch of angst in the film, as befits a story driven by the memory of her dead father, but she also loves what she does. She’s not Batman... She seems to attack situations with two hands, digging in, drunk on raw experience. Jolie’s got the exact right edge to play the role as written. There’s something in Lara that seems almost out of control, and that makes her dangerous, and that makes her even more interesting.”

  Moriarty also admitted to being “unexpectedly moved” by the finale, in which the heroes and villains vie for The Power of God in The Tomb of Ten Thousand Shadows. “The choices faced in this scene make the whole film pay off... There’s a reason they didn’t just pour a pair of tits into the lead role of this film. Jolie’s got to go through some pretty harrowing beats to get to her final destination... The Lara Croft that comes out the other side is both tougher than she’s ever been, and finally able to embrace some sort of life away from danger and death.”