From Danse Macabre, by Stephen King – the True Facts, as recounted by Harlan Ellison, of his pitch, in 1975, for the first Star Trek movie; Roddenberry having advised him that the execs at Paramount “kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn’t big enough.”
"I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had come back to the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with an important ethical problem.
"[Mark] Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘You know, I was reading this book by a guy called Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’
“I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, ‘There weren’t any Mayans at the dawn of time.’ And he said, ‘Well, who’s to know the difference?’ And I said, 'I’m to know the difference. It’s a dumb suggestions.’ So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked the Mayans a lot and why didn’t I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, ‘I’m a writer. I don’t know what the fuck you are!’ And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.”
Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but, “Right on, Harlan!”
Now, if he’d really tried, he could have found a way to work the Mayans into it tangentially, and make Quetzalcoatl a dim racial memory of the alien snake-man . . . but, why?
I remember when the SciFi Channel uses to have some really good miniseries.
Voyager
January 11, 2012, 8:02am
44
Speaking of stupid-ass movies, where everyone knows the real story, I give you the TV movie Noah’s Ark ;
The best of friends, Lot and Noah separate when God takes Lot’s wife from him. When God expands his wrath to create the legendary flood, Noah alone is chosen to save his righteous family. Once aboard, the Earth becomes flooded, and Noah must lead his family to salvation and survival - even if it means facing his former friend Lot, now a leader of desperate…pirates.
I don’t know this for sure, but I smell the work of execs here.
Oh my God - Jon Voight and James Coburn in a Biblical story? I may have to watch that.
BrainGlutton:
From Danse Macabre, by Stephen King – the True Facts, as recounted by Harlan Ellison, of his pitch, in 1975, for the first Star Trek movie; Roddenberry having advised him that the execs at Paramount “kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn’t big enough.”
Now, if he’d really tried, he could have found a way to work the Mayans into it tangentially, and make Quetzalcoatl a dim racial memory of the alien snake-man . . . but, why?
Because then it would be an episode of the Star Trek Animated Series, and that was a terrible episode from a series full of terrible episodes.
Skammer
January 11, 2012, 2:19pm
47
Voyager:
Speaking of stupid-ass movies, where everyone knows the real story, I give you the TV movie Noah’s Ark ;
The best of friends, Lot and Noah separate when God takes Lot’s wife from him. When God expands his wrath to create the legendary flood, Noah alone is chosen to save his righteous family. Once aboard, the Earth becomes flooded, and Noah must lead his family to salvation and survival - even if it means facing his former friend Lot, now a leader of desperate…pirates.
I don’t know this for sure, but I smell the work of execs here.
Holy crap, there is so much wrong with that. If you’re going to make Lot a pirate and Noah’s friend, you should just replace Noah with Moses and have him kill giants with a slingshot.
And throw in a beanstalk.
Patton Oswalt talks a little bit about this process on one of his albums, although he’s talking about more general note-giving:
“When you sell a screenplay, you then go through a one-year notes process that will make you want to stab yourself in the eyes with your own dick that you’ve torn off, shellacked, and turned into a letter opener. That is how insane-
Needs more angels facing off against evil dinosaurs (who, naturally, are trying to sink the ark. Thus explaining why they are extinct).
Voyager:
Speaking of stupid-ass movies, where everyone knows the real story, I give you the TV movie Noah’s Ark ;
What they Should have done is show that because it had no rudder, the ark became lost. And when these pirates came along, they were trying to raid it.
But I can’t think of a good name to go with this.
Bosom Buddies is a well known example. In the original script, it was just two whacky guys trying to make it in the city, but an executive thought it would be great to dress the two guys in drag.
Dinosaurs and snakes.
Hmmm… I like this idea, but do you think you can replace the dinosaur with a shark/octopus hybrid?
Been done. How about coelacanth/capybara?
Hypno-Toad:
What they Should have done is show that because it had no rudder, the ark became lost. And when these pirates came along, they were trying to raid it.
But I can’t think of a good name to go with this.
The Ark That Couldn’t Slow Down?
“There are motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ ark!”
“Um … yeah. That’s the point.”
Spoons
January 12, 2012, 5:31am
60
Lamia:
I just pulled up Elliot’s account and was not-that-surprised to learn that the producer was Jon Peters, who’s already been mentioned in this thread. Anyone who wants to read this story can go to http://www.wordplayer.com/archives/SANDMAN.cover.html and click “INTRO” at the bottom of the screen, a direct link doesn’t seem to work for some reason. A draft of the unproduced screenplay is also available there.
I followed the link and read the draft of the screenplay. I may be a fan of the Sandman books, but even if I wasn’t, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have liked this. Given the complexity of Sandman, it was a good treatment of an early part of the story, and can stand alone as written.
“But, we should have kept the poisonous ones in cages! So much for the unicorns!”
