Tales From Development Hell

by David Hughes

  This shooting draft — credited to Massett, Zinman, Laeta Kalogridis and West himself — was dated 28 July 2000, just three days before production officially commenced at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, before setting off for such diverse locations as Cambodia and Iceland. “Originally, I wrote the idea to be in China, and I was going to use the Terracotta Army as an opposing force,” West commented later. “But it was not possible to organise getting to China in time. And also, when I thought about it, I realised that the Great Wall would only give me one big element, and I needed so much more for that sequence. So I started looking around to other places, because the alternative was to build the Great Wall in Scotland, and the prospect of shooting in Scotland in winter didn’t appeal to me that much, and I didn’t think it was going to look that warm and ‘Chinese-y!’ So I looked around the world for other great settings and I happened to come across Cambodia.”

  As filming continued, numerous cuts made to the budget and schedule meant that there would be fewer pieces to the plot puzzle. As Zinman explained, “We wrote a script that was just huge, and it needed to be scaled back. They had to omit a few costly scenes.” Thus, he added, “In the shooting draft it’s only two pieces of the triangle, [which is] symbolically less satisfying, because it’s only two, not three. But of course, we only have 120 minutes and only have however many millions of dollars.” Further cuts were made for budgetary reasons, including what would appear to be a crucial flashback in which Lord Croft (Jon Voight) explains the mythology, mysticism and might of the ‘Triangle of Light’ to seven year-old Lara, illustrated by cutaways of the action he narrates.

  “Long, long ago, a meteor crashed to Earth,” he explains. “An ancient people excavated the meteor, and found, buried at its core, a mysterious, crystallised metal. They worshipped the metal for its magical powers, forging it into a sacred shape — a perfect triangle. They engraved upon it an emblem of its great power,” he goes on, referring to the ‘all-seeing eye’. “The mysterious Triangle induced great insights in its guardians, great knowledge in mathematics and science. They called themselves ‘The People of the Light’. But others heard of the power of the Triangle and wanted it for themselves. A great war raged, and finally their beautiful Spiral City suffered under a terrible siege. As fire engulfed their homes, the sun appeared to go out. It was a total eclipse. Believing the end of the world to be upon them, their High Priest prayed desperately to the heavens — ‘Let my enemies be vanquished.’ And with the words still on his lips, his prayers were answered in a horrific instant!

  “The High Priest knew that this power should not be held by any man,” he continues. “A power that could explode the human mind. The power of God. He ordered the Triangle cut into two smaller, right-angled triangles. One half was to stay at the Temple, while the other half was to be hidden at the end of the earth to prevent the Triangle’s strange power from being used to change the fate of Humankind. In defiance of the High Priest, the craftsmen who had cut the Triangle in half secretly made a highly advanced clock to serve as a guide to find the hidden piece, and preserve the Triangle’s awesome powers for future generations of their kind. They called themselves ‘The Illuminati’. They all realised that the exact alignment of the planets necessary to activate the Triangle would not be due for another 5,000 years. But eventually, after many centuries, the People of the Light, the craftsmen, and their incredible Spiral City, and of course, their secret clock, disappeared, evaporating from the pages of history.”

  With this sequence cut, says de Souza, the search for the Triangle becomes meaningless, since “it was never clear what it could do. It just said [it had] ‘the power of a God’, or ‘power over time and space’, but what does that mean, really? Stephen Hawking has that, and he doesn’t even get out of his wheelchair!” De Souza also felt that the villains were “campy and arch,” likening the tone to the ill-fated big-screen adaptation of classic 1960s television caper The Avengers. In addition, he says, “When I was on the picture they were saying, ‘We want to get out of England by the end of the first act; we’ve got to be out of England by page thirty.’ So I said ‘OK.’ And this one here it’s barely ninety minutes long, but I think it really is like forty minutes before she leaves her house.” Only three elements of de Souza’s script survived to the shooting script: Lara’s fight against her household cybernetic opponent, her acrobatic gun battle with the invaders of Croft Hall, and the Ray Harryhausen homage in which the statues coming to life. This was not deemed sufficient for the Writers Guild of America to award de Souza a screen credit; instead, Werb, Colleary and Sara B. Cooper share story credit, with Massett, Zinman and West himself receiving credit for the screenplay. Screenwriters commonly fight for credit on a film, often claiming the best ideas as their own; in this case, de Souza says, “all the writers, who maybe under normal circumstances would say, ‘That son of a bitch rewrote me and changed me,’ were united in their dismay of this script, that had not been written so much as unwritten.”

  As if the development had not been hellish enough, problems plagued the production, with the Sunday Express breaking the news on 8 October 2000 that raw footage from the film had been stolen during a daring raid worthy of Lara herself. “Burglars escaped with a rucksack containing sensitive video tapes and a wallet during a burglary at the home of director Simon West,” the tabloid reported, quoting West as saying he was woken by an intruder breaking the front door of his £1.1 million three-bedroomed home in Notting Hill, London. “I was in bed at home when I heard a huge crash downstairs at about 2am,” he said. “I got up and went down but they just ran out. I didn’t see them — just the front door swinging. I must have missed them by a split second. They snatched my bag, which had two or three tapes including all the film so far — literally about half the film. It was everything we’ve done in the last two months.” Two months later, the film made headlines again when Angelina Jolie injured her ankle on location, causing a week’s delay, and adding $1 million to the already bloated budget, now edging towards $100 million.

  Worse was to come, as one of West’s assistants filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the director, and Bobby Klein, reportedly a former “psychologist specialising in stress management” who acts as West’s manager (and received a screen credit as co-producer of the Tomb Raider film). Klein had hired Dana Robinson, a twenty-five year-old agent’s assistant for Creative Artists Agency, but after quitting her job and relocating to London to work on the production, she became uncomfortable with Klein’s sexual advances and other inappropriate behaviour. In a twenty-three-page complaint filed by her lawyers against Klein, West and Paramount, Robinson claimed emotional distress, sexual harassment and wrongful dismissal, since — she alleged — her complaints led to her being given the sack. Attorneys representing Paramount and West counter-claimed that she was dismissed after three months for poor work performance, while West has said that lawsuits like this come with the territory. “I’ve learned that when you get into this position in the entertainment industry, you get targeted,” he told Premiere. “It’s just one of those unfortunate things that when people don’t work out, they look for someone to blame.” Nevertheless, says de Souza, “I do not think there is parking space on the Paramount lot for Simon West.”

  In addition to such problems, de Souza alleges that West went “many, many millions over budget and two months over schedule, so the minute he turned in his interminable 130-minute cut, Paramount showed him the door. They didn’t even let him in the editing room.” Whether or not this is true — West was later invited back to direct minor reshoots in London, and provides director’s commentary for the DVD — Paramount brought in Stuart Baird, a veteran trouble-shooting editor with credits as diverse as Superman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mission: Impossible 2, to re-cut the entire movie. “Stuart Baird has an executive producer credit on the movie,” notes de Souza, “but all he did was re-cut the movie down to eighty-eight minutes (plus generous head and tail credits).” The studio also rejected
the original music score by Michael Kamen (The X-Men), commissioning Pitch Black composer Graeme Revell to produce a new soundtrack — sixty minutes of music — in the space of ten days. “The only way I could write so much music in ten days was to weight the approach in favour of electronics rather than orchestra,” Revell told Dreamwatch magazine. “But this was as much a creative decision as anything because the style of the film does not support a big bombastic orchestral score.” So rushed were the final stages of post-production, that several major effects shots appeared incomplete by the time the film hit theatres. Finally, says de Souza, “They released it and crossed their fingers.”

  Despite problems which stretched from development to post-production and a widespread critical drubbing, the film — now entitled Lara Croft Tomb Raider — opened on 15 June 2001 with a colossal $47.7 million opening weekend, and went on to gross over $130 million in the US alone, and a total of $275 million worldwide. By the time the first weekend’s box office tallies were in, a sequel was already in the works, but although Angelina Jolie was asked to fulfill her contract for a sequel — with a $5 million pay increase — director Simon West was not invited back. “I guess at some point somebody said, ‘We’re not going to go through that shit again,’” suggests de Souza. “‘The director this time is not going to be someone who thinks he’s a writer.’”

  Instead, producers Gordon and Levin hired cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont, whose directing career had derailed after early successes like Speed and Twister, with Speed 2: Cruise Control and The Haunting both proving to be box office disappointments. James V. Hart (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hook) and hot newcomer Dean Georgaris (Paycheck, Mission: Impossible III) were among those hired to work on the script, which concerned a desperate search for Pandora’s Box, the mythical source of all the pain in the world. “The first one did not have a strong story, I’ll be the first to admit it,” producer Lloyd Levin later told Entertainment Weekly. “We should have made a better movie. But we learned from our mistakes and this new one is a better movie. For starters, it’s got a plot.”

  Like West, de Souza did not expect to have anything to do with the Tomb Raider sequel, until he happened to see publicity stills featuring Angelina Jolie in the underwater temple of Alexander the Great. After doing some digging of his own, de Souza discovered that Lara was being partnered with a British agent — just as she had been in his drafts for the first Tomb Raider film. “That’s when I called the Writers Guild and said, ‘Listen, this may sound wacky, but when the Tomb Raider II script comes in for credit determination, could you check it against my “officially discarded” March 1999 script of Tomb Raider I?’” Sure enough, he says, “the Guild reader said, ‘Hold on a second — the source of this script is obviously the de Souza script, resurrected.’ At that point, the studio said, ‘That’s impossible! This script was a cold start, a totally brilliant fresh new approach of sheer geniusity that just happens to have been written by our producer.’” This was a shock, de Souza says, “because I’ve known Lloyd Levin for a dozen years, and he’s never written anything except a memo.”3

  De Souza can only guess what happened. “After the movie opened, on the following Monday, they probably said, ‘We want to have a sequel out in two years,’ which is impossible. Then somebody went to the filing cabinet, found the script I wrote, which had been in pre-production with sets designed, and said, ‘No it’s not — we’ve got a schedule, boards, budgets, breakdowns and production design for the de Souza draft!’ So they resurrected my script, which gave them a head start. It shows how crazy it can get.” Nevertheless, he adds, “It actually showed some kind of efficiency for a change, that somebody had the sense to remember they already had a script they liked from before... returning to the script (and budget, board, location work, prop purchases, etc) all still lying around from only ten months earlier. So they already had the comp’d Scuba gear and underwater sleds, the design for Alexander the Great’s library set, Hogan’s alley, etc.” What was more surprising for de Souza was that he had to find out by accident. “You’d think Larry Gordon would have called me to tell me this,” he says. “I’d worked with him many times. But no — I had to find it out from the Internet.”

  Although Levin and Hart have privately stated that de Souza had nothing to do with the script for the sequel (technically true), the WGA agreed to award de Souza a shared story credit with Hart, with Dean Georgaris receiving sole screenplay credit. “The sequel, with every line of dialogue changed, does essentially follow my script for about twenty minutes,” says de Souza. “Then when the MI6 men come to her house, she wasn’t a bitch on wheels for no discernable reason, but she was thrown by the presence of the younger government guy. [In my draft,] he was the male lead of the picture, and his moment where he betrayed Lara and Queen and Country was in the movie, mind-fucking the audience, instead of in the movie’s back-story. Also, they didn’t know what Alexander had hidden, but they knew the other heavies were killing their way towards it.” Says de Souza, “The Guild said... Tomb Raider II’s genesis from my 1999 script was ‘irrefutable’ — the actual word used in the Guild paperwork — at which point the studio was bound by the sixty-five year-old contract that says, ‘Guild determines credit, period.’ And that’s how I worked on Tomb Raider for six months, but got a screen credit for no months on Tomb Raider II!”

  Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life finally opened on 24 July 2003 with a disappointing first-weekend take of $21.8 million — less than half that of the original — and an overall worldwide gross of $156 million. Critics were slightly kinder than they had been the first time around, but it was obvious that the paying public weren’t impressed. Paramount was swift to try and place the blame for the film’s failure elsewhere. “The only thing that we can attribute it to is that gamers were not happy with the latest version of the videogame,” ventured the studio’s Wayne Lewellen, referring to the critically derided PlayStation 2 game Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, which had failed to repeat the success of earlier incarnations. Entertainment Weekly had a different opinion: “If Paramount had spent a few bucks on polling, it might have discovered that despite its $131 million gross, nobody who went to the first Tomb Raider walked out saying, ‘Can’t wait for part two!’”

  The Tomb Raider property suffered mixed fortunes in the wake of the twin debacles of the Angel of Darkness console game and Cradle of Life movie. In 2006, Crystal Dynamics superseded Core Design as overseers of the game’s future development, inviting one of the original creators, Toby Gard, to work on a Tomb Raider reboot, which would take Lara Croft back to her tomb-raiding roots. The resulting game, Tomb Raider: Legend, was a bestselling title on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, and a remake of the original game — Tomb Raider: Anniversary — was developed and released in 2007, followed by Tomb Raider: Underworld a year later, all proving moderately successful. On 18 August 2010, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix released a download-only title, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the first game not to feature the words ‘Tomb Raider’ in the title. That nomenclature was being held back for a ground-breaking reboot of the franchise, scheduled for late 2012.

  Similar plans were being drawn up to revive the film franchise, with British producer Graham King’s GK Films, the company behind Rango, The Town and Angelina Jolie topliner The Tourist, acquiring the motion picture rights, and announcing Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — who wrote Jon Favreau’s smash hit Iron Man and the less successful Cowboys & Aliens — as screenwriters. “Mark and Hawk’s sensibilities of action and emotion are perfect for the direction we are taking this franchise,” King said in a press statement in early 2011, the 15th anniversary of the first Tomb Raider game. Ignoring the previous films, the new Tomb Raider story would be a fashionable ‘reboot’, returning to Lara Croft’s roots and re-telling her backstory for a new era. As the screenwriters commented, “We aim to write an origin story for Lara Croft that solidifies her place alongside Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor in t
he pantheon of great female action heroes.” Whether the new Tomb Raider can repeat the success of the Aliens and Terminator franchises remains to be seen.

  _____________

  1 Now commonly known as the PlayStation One.

  2 Fans may have been even more doubtful if they knew that Jolie wanted Lara to have a Mohawk hairstyle instead of Lara’s plaited pony-tail.

  3 Even if Levin did contribute to the screenplay, as he claims, the WGA makes it even more difficult for producers to achieve writing credits than directors, for obvious reasons.

  THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FILM

  How James Cameron, Roland Emmerich and others encountered huge problems trying to remake ’60s sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage

  “Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage — it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over and I hated it.”

  — Roland Emmerich on James Cameron’s version of Fantastic Voyage

  In 1965, an episode of the popular television series I Dream of Jeannie had an intriguing plot, in which Major Nelson (Larry Hagman) acts as a technical consultant for a movie in which an American astronaut is miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a Russian cosmonaut, in an effort to retrieve information from his brain.

  Less than a year later, on 24 August 1966, a movie with a startlingly similar premise appeared in US cinemas. “This film will take you where no one has ever been before,” declared a title card that preceded the film.1 “No eye witness has ever seen what you are about to see. But in this world of ours, where going to the moon will soon be upon us, where the most incredible things are happening all around us, some day — perhaps tomorrow — the fantastic events you are about to see can and will take place.” Entitled Fantastic Voyage, the film starred Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch as members of an experimental expedition injected into the body of an American scientist, Jan Benes, in a miniaturized submarine known as Proteus. Their mission: to dislodge a life-threatening blood clot that Benes sustained during a failed assassination attempt by an enemy spy. Voyaging through the bloodstream, the crew of the Proteus encounters numerous hazards, including an ‘arteriovenous fistula’, an attack by antibodies and white blood cells, an oxygen shortage — even deliberate sabotage by one of the crew.