Countdown Halted Movie Review
Movie history is littered with rumors and wistful assertions of Masterpieces That Never Were. In sf and fantasy genres especially, technical problems, cost overruns, and artistic challenges leave many intriguing projects abandoned on the launch pad. Some might have been immortal classics. Others, well….
CHILDHOOD'S END. Despite the artistic and financial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, this Arthur C. Clarke novel of mystical alien contact found no home at Universal Pictures in the early ‘70s despite screenplays submitted by both Howard W. Koch and Abraham Polonsky. The studio balked at the proposed $13 million price tag, while Polonsky complained “People keep telling me it's too intelligent for a movie.”
THE DEMOLISHED MAN. Alfred Bester's 1953 book (the first novel to win a Hugo Award) about a murderer trying to escape justice in a society patrolled and regulated by powerful telepaths, was turned into a script in 1968. By the late ‘70s it was supposedly ready to roll under Carrie director Brian De Palma but never did.
DUNE. A decade before David Lynch's 1984 attempt, filmmaker/illustrator/eccentric Alejandro Jodorowski was tapped to bring Frank Herbert's Hugo-winning saga to the screen, with Orson Welles in a major role and Dan O'Bannon to head special f/x. Prominent fantasy/sf artists H.R. Giger (who later teamed with O'Bannon for Alien) and Chris Foss contributed spacecraft, set, and costume designs; their published portfolios contain some amazing paintings of what might have been.
THE FANTASTIC LITTLE GIRL. Success of The Incredible Shrinking Man prompted Universal to have writer Richard Matheson dash out an encore (while the first film's trick sets still stood available). In it, the Shrinking Man's wife also dwindles and joins him, and they would both return to normal stature in the happy ending, but the studio lost interest.
I, ROBOT. Isaac Asimov's groundbreaking 1950 short-story cycle forever changed how sf literature treated ‘mechanical men’ and artificial intelligence. In 1978 Harlan Ellison completed a script version that was never filmed. “Harlan was asked to make the robots ‘cute’ like R2D2,” Asimov explained, and when Ellison refused to hack out a Star Wars clone, the studio suits aborted the expensive project. Ellison's effort so pleased Asimov, though, that he serialized it in his namesake magazine in 1987. I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay appeared in book form in 1994.
INTERFACE. Chip Prosler's f/x-crammed original script concerns a wounded pilot on life-support whose body is a shattered shell but whose mind reaches glorious new horizons when he's neurologically linked to high technology. Francis Ford Coppola juggled the property around with other biggies while trying to save his sinking studio. Weak reaction to the soundalike Innerspace (another Prosler script) didn't help the cause.
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Ray Harryhausen planned a 1970s adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, in which his famed stop-motion techniques would animate the half-human “manimals.” When other filmmakers commenced the Burt Lancaster version eventually released in 1977 (featuring beast-men in conventional f/x makeup), Harryhausen's remained on the drawing board.
NIGHT SKIES. Long mentioned as Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind followup, this chiller about folks under siege by unfriendly UFO occupants was reportedly influenced by John Ford's settlers-vs.-Indians drama Drums Along the Mohawk. Night Skies’ pack of unearthly marauders included a less-threatening little being who was always tagging along after the rest. From that seed grew the premise of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.
PUMA. A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess scripted this loose reworking of When Worlds Collide with a social conscience. It had the backing of the team behind the blockbusters Jaws and The Sting, but both Paramount and Universal shied at its pre-Waterworld budget of $20 million.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Robert Heinlein's cult sf novel about a Christ-like alien visitor (somewhat similar thematically to The Man Who Fell to Earth) has been bandied about as a screen property for decades, with one script completed in 1971 by Lewis John Carlino. But top movie execs haven't grokked yet.
THE TIME MACHINE II. Throughout the 1970s, George Pal sought to sell uncomprehending studio brass on the idea of a sequel to his 1960 hit that would follow the son of H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler onward to more adventures, including a peek at the end of the world. Ray Harryhausen signed on to handle f/x work, but ultimately only the novelization (by Pal and Joe Morhaim) of the screenplay was completed.