I just got the book “The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made” by Chris Gore and I highly recommend it. As the title says, it’s a collection of essays on fifty real movies that never made it to the screen. It tells about movies like A Day at the UN (Billy Wilder directing the Marx Brothers); Dean Martin (a biography by Martin Scorsese); Destino (a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali); Heart of Darkness (the movie Orson Welles wanted to make instead of Citizen Kane); Mein Kampf (David Selznick’s WWII adaptation of Hitler’s book to expose his beliefs to America); and Something’s Gotta Give (the movie Marilyn Monroe was working on when she died).
This book is better than chocolate covered crack for any fan of film history. Its only flaws are that it was cut down from the original planned 100 movies and the fact that before you finish it you’ll be upset over reading about movies you’ll never be able to see.
I picked up my copy on the Hamilton Books website incidentally, which is selling the book at a discount.
I have that book myself. It worth noting, by the way, that at least a small handfull of movies listed in it have actually been made, in the few years since it was first published. “Try and spot 'em, it’s fun!”
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if I, Claudius was included. There was a documentary made about it that aired once when the “I, Claudius” TV series was on PBS. They made about a third of the movie before one of the stars(Merle Oberon as Messalina) got badly hurt in a car accident. There had been other production porblems so they had to quit. Charles Laughton as Claudius, Flora Robson as Livia, it would have been great.
As a side note, if you can get the I, Claudius DVD box set, that documentary is included. I haven’t seen it in a while, but the list of production problems finally reached a state of critical mass and the plug was pulled on the whole thing.
On the same topic, the movie Tigrero: A Film That was Never Made was an interesting piece.
From the IMDB:
*“In 1993, Sam Fuller takes Jim Jarmusch on a trip into Brazil’s Mato Grosso, up the River Araguaia to the village of Santa Isabel Do Morro, where 40 years before, Zanuck had sent Fuller to scout a location and write a script for a movie based on a tigrero, a jaguar hunter. Sam hopes to find people who remember him, and he takes film he shot in 1954. He’s Rip Van Winkle, and, indeed, a great deal changed in the village. There are televisions, watches, and brick houses. But, the same Karajá culture awaits as well. He gathers the villagers to show his old film footage, and people recognize friends and relatives, thanking Fuller for momentarily bringing them back to life.”
*
Is Federico Fellini’s Moraldo in the City in there? I read that screenplay once, long ago.
It was totally cool, because Moraldo was supposed to be a sequel to I Vitelloni. When that film didn’t get made, Fellini recycled much of the screenplay and tucked it into La Dolce Vita. It gives LDV a whole new spin.
The 1936 production of I, Claudius is one of the movies in this book. Tigrero and Moraldo in the City were not mentioned although another possible Fuller project The Lusty Days, a black comedy set during the civil war, was.
I promised myself “no more new books 'till after the holidays: I have presents to buy!”, and you go and make…no…FORCE me to break my promise to myself.
Yeah…that’s the ticket…pin the blame on the turn-o’-the-century comic strip character!
I think it can be safely said that Welles’ 1940 production of Heart of Darkness would have been noticably different from Coppola’s 1979 version. For one thing, I think Welles would have been very unlikely to use Conrad’s novel as a metaphor for American intervention in Vietnam.
Welles apparently did plan on a political message; he planned on using Kurtz as a symbol of fascism. Welles also planned on playing both Kurtz and Marlow, the man sent to kill Kurtz. Despite this, Welles would have appeared on camera only a relatively few times. Kurtz wouldn’t have appeared until late in the film and Welles planned on shooting the whole film literally from Marlow’s point of view; the only time Marlow would be seen would be in reflections.
But WWII intervened and the studio decided with the loss of their European audience, they needed a film with a more American subject. That film turned out to be Citizen Kane.
There might be one visual similarity between Welles’ and Coppola’s projects. Years ago I got a look at some of the production drawings that were done for the 1939 Heart of Darkness. I remember Kurtz’s redoubt was pretty similar to the layout that Coppola used in Apocalypse Now.
I never learned if that was deliberate, or if it was the much more likely probability that both projects relied on Joseph Conrad’s description. Either way, I wish I could see those drawings again.
Yes, there was a Heart of Darkness featuring John Malkovich as Kurtz.
However, as long as Orson Welles fans are crying our eyes out, he worked intermittently on a film about a talented and washed up director during the last decade or so of his life called “The Other Side of the Wind” starring his friend John Huston, which never got far enough along to edit. All involved were very fond of the project, but it never got anywhere.
As for music albums, Smile by the Beach Boys was the best never made.