Occasionally you’ll hear about a movie being made that you can’t wait to see. So you wait . . . and wait . . . Filmmaking is such a costly and complicated business that there are any number of factors that can kill a promising concept, or at least put it into indefinite coldsleep.
Watchmen: it was announced as a film back in the early 80s, and is still being developed. Several scripts and directors (including Terry Gilliam) have worked on it, but still nothing. The IMDB lists it as still being in production, so that’s coming up on 20 years.
Neuromancer was sold to the movies about when the book came out in 1984; we’re still waiting.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was listed by Lucasfilm as being in production almost from when Return of the Jedi was released. However, Lucas really didn’t do any work on it until the late 90s.
Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is in development limbo – everything is owned by its insurance company – but if money does come along, he would be ready to do it. The story is told in Lost in La Mancha.
Orson Welles’s Othello took over three years to complete (a very long time back then) because he kept running out of money and had to take acting jobs to raise funds.
Hotel Imperial – while not all that long in terms of time, it had its own sort of hell, going through three leading ladies, at least two directors, dozens of scripts, and nearly killing its leading man, Ray Milland.
Back in the early 1980’s somebody wanted to film A Confederacy of Dunces with John Belushi. Didn’t happen, and I’ve occasionally heard about a new project, most recently with Phillip Seymour Hoffman discussed as a possibility to place Ignatius. (I think he’d be great.) It should be filmable.
For years I’ve heard about plans to film a new movie version of Richard Matheson’s great novel I Am Legend. First I heard about it with Schwarzenneger involved (which would probably have been a bad idea) and then as – no lie – a comedy with Will Smith. (Oh, Christ. I just checked IMDB, and that last one is in fact announced for 2007. No! Wait. . . it’s listed under “Drama”; so maybe they’re not going to screw it up. But the director has only done music videos and Constantine. Goddamnit!)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was talked about becoming a movie from almost the beginning of the first book’s popularity. Even before the BBC-TV miniseries of the 80s, if I’m remembering correctly. And each time a new book was added to the “trilogy,” the rumors, talk, and “insider information” got spalshed about a lot, esp as the internet took off. And finally, it was filmed. Kind of a gnaB giB when it came out, if you ask me. So what was that? 25 or more years?
If you’re going for some kind of record, I’d say the longest wait between the source material and the adaptation goes to The Ten Commandments. What’s that, about 3000 years?
Last I’d heard—a few months back—hadn’t they been planning on doing the stories faithfully…except for cutting out all the anti-christianity subtext? [mind boggled smiley]
That’s as bad as Superman fighting polar bears with his black gay robot buddy, just in a different way.
Yeah, but only because Future Robert Zemeckis came back from the future in his DeLorean and told Present Day Zemeckis how bad it sucked, so he ended up not making it.