- Author: David Hughes
- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Titan Books
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0857687239
- ISBN-13: 978-0857687234
Synopsis: A compulsively readable journey into the area of film-making where all writers, directors and stars fear to tread: Development Hell, the place where scripts are written, actors hired and sets designed… but the films rarely actually get made!
Whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky’s Batman movie starring Clint Eastwood? Why were there so many scripts written over the years for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s fourth Indiana Jones movie? Why was Lara Croft’s journey to the big screen so tortuous, and what prevented Paul Verhoeven from filming what he calls “one of the greatest scripts ever written”? Why did Ridley Scott’s Crisis in the Hot Zone collapse days away from filming, and were the Beatles really set to star in Lord of the Rings? What does Neil Gaiman think of the attempts to adapt his comic book series The Sandman? All these lost projects, and more, are covered in this major book, which features many exclusive interviews with the writers and directors involved.
David Hughes, the author of The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, is back with another collection of stories about Hollywood dropping the ball. Tales From Development Hell is an expansion of Hughes’ first project, broadening the scope of Hughes’ research to encompass action adventure, fantasy, and science fiction films that we never got to see and helps us understand just how hard it is to get everyone involved in the business of making a movie on the same page; it also illustrates how actors and producers can continue to beat the life out of a project long after the body’s grown cold.
Hughes is a clever writer; he’s funny, and his stories are well researched. That said, sometimes this book can piss you off. Not the book itself mind, but the stupidity that prevented some of these projects from seeing the light of day. On the other hand, some of these movies sound really cool on paper but should thankfully didn’t make it to the screen. One such is Darren Aronofsky‘s vision for an R-rated Batman movie that was a very, very loose adaptation of Frank Miller‘s Batman: Year One. As cool as an idea as it is, Aronofsky knows as much about the Dark Knight as Tim Burton. By which I mean he doesn’t know a fraking thing.
Tales from Development Hell takes us through some of the greatest nearly made sci-fi films, shedding light on the process that led to their development deaths. Hughes takes this a step further by including several action and adventure films outside the genre, and it makes for a fascinating read, something that appeals to the movie buff in all of us.
I give Tales From Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? Four out of Five Stars.
Pick up your copy of Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? from Amazon today!
[AMAZONPRODUCT=0857687239]
