At his lowest point, he woke up one morning came to a realization: “I’m not an auteur. I need to write with other people, I need people to work against. It’s not about self-exploration--it’s not about me--it’s about making the best movie possible.”56 He allowed himself to admit that he didn’t have every answer, and needed the help of those around him -- and when he did that, the team rose up and problems began to be solved. With Finding Nemo, things began to fall into place and the film went on to massive success, both critically and at the box office. Along the way, Stanton had learned the he needed collaboration, thrived on it, and could get lost in the weeds without it.
Stanton and Andrews reread the books and then compared their reactions.
First, there was the matter of determining an overall attitude or approach toward the original material. Cook had given Stanton full latitude to approach the material the way he wanted to, so there was no pressure from that area. Nor was there, in Stanton’s view, pressure from the kind of huge and demanding fan base that, say, a filmmaker adapting Harry Potter would face: “The harsh truth is that the Burroughs fans are slowly, slowly fading. I don’t have some big Harry Potter problem where everybody is going to be offended if I change anything. it was the opposite. I was afraid it was going to fall down the sewer grate of history and no one was going to find it again.”57
So as a starting point, Stanton felt that he had considerably more latitude than he would if he were adapting a currently wildly popular literary property -- moreover, he felt that the series had ceased garnering new, youthful adherents at least in part because of certain aspects that, in spite of the wealth of imaginative value in the books, were out of synch with modern sensibilities. Stanton felt he understood what the problem was -- and he had a plan for dealing with it in a way that he thought would update the material, while still remaining true to the spirit of Burroughs’ original, and without changing the world of Barsoom in anything other than minor ways. Stanton’s intention was that viewers of the movie would find themselves immersed in a richly detailed, fully realized rendering of Burroughs’ Barsoom that was populated by the peoples, cultures, creatures, and history as Burroughs had imagined it.
Not only would Stanton retain the post Civil War period setting on Earth -- he would stay true to Burroughs’ era in terms of design concepts and execution, offering in effect a period appropriate “Steampunk” version of Barsoom. All of this would be fully in synch with the books. The changes would come not to the world, but to some of the characters and certain elements of the story which Stanton felt he could improve upon while making sure that the movie produced in the viewer the same feeling at he’d had as a kid when reading the books -- a feeling of wonder, a bit of awe, and delight and extraordinary world of Burroughs’ Barsoom.
Problem number one in Stanton’s view was what Stanton perceived as the “episodic” nature of the material. He was aware that A Princess of Mars had originally appeared a five part serial in All-Story Magazine, and Burroughs, and he made various comments that suggested that he believed the original story had been written in episodes designed to fit the five part serialization -- each with their own climax, each ending with a cliffhanger that pulled the reader forward and kept them waiting for the next installment.
Stanton’s assessment accurately reflected the fact that the neophyte writer Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars was not as finely structured, particularly in the final third, as Stanton needed it to be. But the notion that it had been written as a series of segmented episodes was little more than a myth -- Burroughs had written the first 43,000 words and submitted them, then submitted the final 60,000 + word version without knowing how it would be published, or in how many segments. (Tarzan, after all, would be published in its entirety in one edition.)
Stanton’s assessment:58
There's a whole air factory kind of climax at the end that really had no connection to anything from the beginning of the movie. It was very disconnected. You're so used to -- when you see a well told story in a movie -- things you learn about in the front have some significance in the back end of the story. And the book isn't like that. It was a real problem. Because the book was written as a serial in a magazine -- each chapter had to have its own cliffhangers. You wanted to have a problem that was resolved by the end of the chapter. So as a novel, it looks like train cars all attached together with no attachment from the caboose to the engine. So we had to take the parts off of the car and remake a new car and use as many parts from the car and repurpose them.
In Stanton’s view, a subcomponent of the problem of the novel being too episodic was that there was no main antagonist or villain -- it shifted throughout the story, and that, Stanton was sure, would not work for a single 2 hour film. He would unify the story around a villain who had some heft, and would be there for the duration.
Secondly, there was the problem of making the two main characters -- John Carter and Dejah Thoris -- relevant and relatable to 2012 audiences. Stanton acknowledged that what had drawn him to the stories had been the alien world Burroughs had created (and which Stanton first experienced through the Marvel comic books) -- the vividness and strangeness of it all. He had never, even in his youth, fully bought into the John Carter character, who even then he had found to be a bit too bland.59
Stanton felt that Burroughs’ John Carter was in most respects a Prince Valiant-like figure -- “perfect knight” who lacked the complexity, and a hint of darkness, that modern audiences were looking for. “A character who is iconic like John Carter can be very vanilla, very boring, like ‘I am the hero.’ He reads like that in the book. I wanted someone where all the novel stuff--justice, ‘have to save the day’ or ‘take that risk’ or ‘be crazy’--where all of that is all on the inside. And what would make it more interesting, he didn’t want to be attached to that anymore.” Stanton’s John Carter would still have the inner code, the inner need to do right and act honorably -- but it would be submerged beneath an exterior that rejected those things.60
Stanton’s perception of Dejah Thoris in the books was that she was too passive, too much a “damsel in distress” for modern day audiences. As a result, the books turned too much on what Stanton would term “rescue heroism” and not enough on characters who had the kind of arc that Stanton, and the modern audiences whom he felt his own inner fanboy represented, would need. Dejah would need to be updated and given a more active storyline.
Again, it seems that Stanton’s perception may have been skewed by the comic books being his original source. Dejah Thoris of the novel A Princess of Mars is hardly a wilting damsel in distress. In that novel, ERB’s Dejah leads a scientific expedition into hostile territory and when taken prisoner makes a bold, impassioned speech to Lorquas Ptomel, leader of the Tharks.; upon seeing Sarkoja attempt to blind Carter with a mirror during a duel, launches herself “like a young tigress” on the 12 foot high Sarkoja; when Carter stays behind to hold off the Warhoons, she dismounts her thoat and tells Sola she will not leave John Carter to die; and finally agrees to sacrifice her happiness for the safety of Helium by entering into an arranged marriage with Sab Than.61
Apart from addressing the episodic nature and adjusting the characters, there was a third issue that Stanton considered to be a serious deficiency -- how does John Carter get to Mars? In Stanton’s view, the Burroughs approach which involved virtually no discernible science would simply not be acceptable to a 2012 audience. “Even when I was a young kid and I read it. That was the weakest thing in the book. I was like -- what? How did he get to Mars? Everybody I ever met that was always your connective moment, your shibboleth ….like …yeah…how does he get there? I don't get it. It was really just a hole that needed to be filled …. it was kind of unaddressed. so it was a perfect thing, just from a story construction standpoint, make it a fly in the ointment ….make him, just by accidentally coming across what he does, it's a harbinger of the problem he's going to be for everything.”62
Stanton knew he would face recrimi
nations for the Burroughs fan base for many of these changes, but he was banking on the fact that the Burroughs core fans were few and becoming fewer as the years passed:63
“It's very obvious to me, nobody knows. it's few and far between you can find people….with each generation…the older people are, the more likely they know, the younger, less likely, so I had to write this in the same way the marvel comics people wrote it in the 70's….the same thing with the movie…I don't expect you to know about the material…..this his not like "this novel is finally come to the screen for all you fans. I don't know if there are any fans out there, but the novel has been made into a film."
Stanton of course knew that there were, in fact, fans of the original material -- typically Baby Boomers who had discovered the Burroughs through the Ace and Ballantine paperback reprints in the 1960s. But these were simply not numerous enough to make pleasing them a priority.
One person Stanton did feel he needed to get on board with the changes was Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the keeper of the flame of the Burroughs legacy. On October 2, 2007, Stanton, co-writer Mark Andrews, and producer Jim Morris visited the offices of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc, where they were briefed and shown archival materials by Burroughs. Stanton explained his intentions regarding the character of John Carter and according to both Stanton and Jim Morris, obtained Burroughs’ enthusiastic approval.64
There was another potential problem with the material, and this one was not of Burroughs making -- the strip-mining of Burroughs imagination. For 100 years everyone from Flash Gordon to Star Wars and Avatar had been making liberal use of Burroughs’ creativity, and there was a very real risk that the original, finally making it to the screen at the end of the “100 years in the making” development, would feel derivative of the imitators. Stanton accepted this and felt on the one hand that it reinforced the need for him to seek ways to “refresh” the material without losing the essential feel of it, while on the other hand it stood as an element in the equation that would never completely be conquered. Stanton said:65
There's this weird familiarity with it, you feel like, do I know these people, have I been there before? and that's unavoidable, but I knew that nobody has ever done the specifics of the books, nobody has ever captured the exact DNA…like you spent all this time in the world meeting people that kind of looked like this person, but nobody has that person’s….the real person's personality…….and that's what we really tried to capture was ……that specific personality of the book.
Although Stanton consciously did not allow himself to go too deeply into the “world-build” aspect of the development at this early stage, preferring to concentrate on story first, then design, he nevertheless also made one key design related decision that affected the storytelling and structure.
A film such as this could be undertaken with a wide range of visual styles. At the one end was the largely “fantastical” approach, filmed against green screens and emerging with the look of something like 300, or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, while at the other end was something which, while still fantastic due to the subject matter, would have a more realistic texture to it.
In contemplating this, Stanton looked into his own reaction as a reader and came away with the realization that while Burroughs’ world of Barsoom was indeed fantastic, one of the key components of Burroughs writing style had been to make it feel real -- so much so, that as a reader it felt more like a plausible adventure to another, very exotic country, than a pure fantasy journey to someplace that clearly could never exist unless laws of physics and reality were reversed. There was no sorcery in Burroughs’ books; and things that appeared to be fantastic did so according to laws of science and physics. Because of this, Stanton felt, the essential feeling of reading the books was different than reading other fantastic fiction: “When you read the books, you forget you are on a different planet in space, you feel like you're in another country with another culture…….and that's what I felt was more interesting about it…..that sort of adventurer explorer aspect of it.”66 It would be, as producer Lindsey Collins would later put it, “Master and Commander in the skies above Mars.”
In the end, Stanton concluded that the key was to recreate the feeling of an extraordinary but ultimately real place -- a world rich in history and culture; a world with laws of science and physics that made logical sense even when they involved different rules than earth; a world that the audience could sink its teeth into and a where those who, like Stanton, had read the books, would feel was indeed the Barsoom they had loved. Beyond that, many changes would be needed and Stanton and Andrews set about writing the screenplay confident that they had a plan that made sense -- now it was a matter of implementing it.
Changing the Character of John Carter
In both the book and the movie, John Carter is a former Virginia cavalryman who is searching for gold in Arizona when he is inexplicably transported to Mars. In both cases he is a talented swordsman; accomplished fighting man and principled human being operating under a “code” that is grounded in a sense of what is honorable and what is not. And in both cases he ends up identifying with Barsoom and adopting it as his home planet. But his path in getting there is vastly different in the two treatments.
John Carter of the novel A Princess of Mars is a spiritually whole fighting man who is given an air of mystery by the fact that he does not age, and does not remember his childhood. He is drawn to Mars in a moment of profound personal transition (he believes his earthly self has died) and accepts that he is on Mars as a matter of destiny. Given a second chance at life in a new world with which he feels a special kinship, he relishes his new life and new world, learning the culture and winning respect and allies from among the culture where fate has cast him, living by his own code of honor at all times. He knows his own heart and knows his “ideal” woman when fate brings him together with her, even though she was “hatched from an egg” and is not even of his own species.67 He impulsively and effectively defends first himself, then Woola, then Dejah Thoris’ honor and places himself in her service, making sure that she is safe and properly cared for, repeatedly displaying self-denial in favor of her well being. Though never referred to as a “knight” — Carter is everything that the chivalric code demands: courageous, honorable, gentle, courteous, and spiritually aware. He treats Dejah Thoris in a manner consistent with courtly love, placing his service to her above his personal desires, inwardly committing himself to her in a deep and spiritual fashion without demanding that she love him in return.
John Carter as drawn by Burroughs was a character who captured the imagination of readers in its day, evoking the “I want to be like him” emotional response in males, and “I want to be with him” emotional response in females, in a deeply archetypal way. For male readers who came upon Burroughs’ creation in adolescence, John Carter was the embodiment of the “better self”, the “masculine man” who was everything one could hope to be. For women readers, he was the elusive man of dreams – the reason to not “settle” for the ordinary, because out there somewhere is a John Carter.
Was Burroughs’ Carter too bland, as Stanton believed? Did he really need to be made more conflicted, more flawed? Certainly to do so was a legitimate choice, but was it a choice made necessary by a deficiency in Burroughs’ Carter, or by a reluctance on Stanton’s part to delve into and explore what Burroughs had provided?
Robert McKee, in his much cited Hollywood screenwriting tome, Story, writes:68
The Law of Conflict is more than an aesthetic principle; it is the soul of story. Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict. As Jean-Paul-Sartre expressed it -- the essence of reality is scarcity, a universal and eternal lacking. There isn’t enough of anything in this world to go around. Not enough food, not enough love, not enough justice . . . .
Burroughs’ Carter may not have been conflicted in the manner of the now familiar modern flawed hero -- but he was the ep
itome of the character for whom conflict is scarcity. Lost on Earth, a man without a past, searching for meaning, he reaches an end in the Arizona cave -- is it death? Or something else? He’s not sure, but then he break free of that, and is filled with yearning, and from the moment he arrives on Barsoom the eternal lacking is there, but now with the promise of fulfillment -- and his quest to find that which is lacking is the “conflict” that pulls the reader forward. Reborn, he first seeks respect among the Tharks, building an alliance of Woola first, then Sola, then Tars Tarkas. Then Dejah Thoris arrives and awakens within him an even more intense scarcity, a scarcity of love -- not just romantic love, but knightly love -- allegiance first to Dejah Thoris, but eventually, through her, to Helium and as the series of books progresses, to Barsoom. Burroughs’ Carter evoked the emotions that William Faulkner spoke about in his classic Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to . . . help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” Burroughs’ hero may have harkened back to that glory of man’s past; he may have framed Carter in line with Faulkner’s “the old verities and truths of the heart.”
But to Stanton’s sensibility this was a risk -- unless tempered by a “damaged goods” status at the outset of the book. He concluded that a 2012 audience, 98% of whom had never been exposed to the books, were likely to be far more familiar with the “damaged goods” flawed hero and better be able to relate to a hero who progresses from that state to a state, near the end of the story, that approximated Burroughs’ character.
Stanton’s John Carter
Stanton’s Carter is haunted by the past but at the outset, we don’t know exactly what, or why. When Powell attempts to press him into service for the Union Cavalry, he resists with a sullen demeanor and the reckless fearlessness of someone who has nothing to lose. He makes is clear that no external cause has meaning for him; “whatever you think I owe……I have already paid.” After saying this, Carter looks at his hand, where two wedding bands -- a man’s and a woman’s -- are visible. Carter’s message: Leave me alone! He is a widowed man whose purpose in life has evaporated, and who is going about his quest for gold with an almost zombie-like sense of leaden persistence.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood Page 7
