Tales From Development Hell (25 page)

In March 2000, Alan Ladd Jr entered the fray with a project closely linked to actress Terry Moore (née Helen Koford), who was married to Hughes between 1949 and 1956, and won the right to call herself Hughes’ widow after a protracted legal battle. “I never got a divorce from Howard,” she explains. “I left him because I thought he was cheating on me, and married Stewart Cramer.” A staunch defender of Hughes and naturally antipathetic to many of the published biographies, Moore met Ladd through a mutual friend and urged him to tell her version of events in a film project to counterbalance productions focussing on the more bizarre, and possibly baseless, stories surrounding the troubled tycoon.

“Much of what has been written about him was just false,” Ladd told
Variety.
“He never had those huge fingernails and toenails, that was just not true.” Nevertheless, he added, “There are some wonderful anecdotes. He was deaf in one ear, which caused his shyness, and his mother had a major clean fetish. In fact, when he came over, he would have to wash his hands in lye — all kinds of awful stuff.” More shocking were Moore’s claims that her ex-husband’s death was caused by a group of former employees who kept him isolated from the world. “He was kept a drugged, virtual prisoner,” said Ladd. “It’s just a horrible story.” The basis of the film would be two books by Moore which Ladd had optioned,
The Passions of Howard Hughes
and
The Beauty and the Billionaire,
as well as Moore’s ‘life rights.’ “What I want to tell is the story of his true genius,” he stated. “I’m not interested in his sleeping with Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn. This would approach the genius
of a man, while exposing the myths and truths, not the sexploitations.” Whether this was the version of events likely to appeal to Hollywood, however, was open to question. Although no actor was connected with the Ladd project, Moore herself reveals a number of candidates whom she would find suitable. “Jeremy Irons, Pierce Brosnan or Nicolas Cage would all be very interesting,” she says. “You could go with Tom Hanks — he’s got the same kind of qualities that Howard had: he’s tall and lanky and has that kind of sweetness about him, and great charisma.” Moore claims that licensed pilot John Travolta had bought one of Hughes’ old aircraft to endear himself to her, and that Nicolas Cage took flying lessons in a bid to win the role. “So when you come down to it, there’s really a lot of people.”

As the twenty-first century dawned, more Hughes movie projects began to emerge. New Regency, which was once lined up to partner Disney in the Mann-DiCaprio production, revealed its intention to make a film of its own, pairing Edward Norton — who had won his breakthrough role in
Primal Fear
after DiCaprio backed out — with veteran director Milos Forman. The untitled film had been scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who had co-written two other biopics for director Forman:
The People Vs. Larry Flynt
and
Man on the Moon,
the story of comedian Andy Kaufman. “Ten years ago, we would have said, ‘How can you go up against Warren Beatty?’ and now it’s, ‘How can you go up against Michael Mann and Leonardo?’” Alexander told
Variety.
Karaszewski, meanwhile, admitted that fierce competition from fellow filmmakers made the project a dicey prospect. “As writers, the problem is we’d have to spend the year working hard before finding out the project across the street had gotten a green light and we’ve wasted our time,” he said. “With both Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt, we knew we were the only ones.”

Events took a turn for the weird in February 2001, when
Inside.com
reported that Charles Evans Jr, nephew of one-time studio head and film producer Robert Evans, was suing New Line Cinema, Michael Mann and Artists Management Group (AMG), claiming that the Howard Hughes project he had nurtured for years had been taken away from him. “No one has worked harder to bring the story of Howard Hughes to the screen in contemporary Hollywood than Evans,” Pat Broeske, co-author of
Howard Hughes: The Untold Story,
asserted. “It is a passion of Charlie Evans.” In his lawsuit, Evans claimed to have conceived the idea for a film about Hughes’ tempestuous youth in 1993, and spent several years poring over the details of his life, before securing the rights to adapt
The Untold Story
for a film.
Through his company Accapella Films, Evans hired actor Kevin Spacey to direct the film, securing financing from New Regency, which hired Jack Fincher to write a screenplay. Meanwhile, Evans learned that DiCaprio was interested in playing Hughes, and entered into negotiations with DiCaprio’s manager at AMG, Rick Yorn. “As a result of these discussions,” the lawsuit stated, “Yorn, acting on behalf of DiCaprio, informed Evans that DiCaprio would never join the project as long as any director (i.e. Spacey) not selected by DiCaprio, was attached.” After what he described as “many sleepless nights”, Evans picked DiCaprio over Spacey, and when DiCaprio settled on Michael Mann as his favoured director and made a studio production pact, Evans found himself cut out of the deal. The lawsuit was eventually settled, with Evans winning the right to a credit as producer, along with Mann and his partner Sandy Climan, DiCaprio, and co-financer Graham King, president of Initial Entertainment Group.

Yet another Howard Hughes project emerged when
Variety
announced in September 2001 that William Friedkin, director of
The Exorcist
and
The French Connection,
would produce and direct a “feature film or telefilm or miniseries” based on Richard Hack’s book
Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire,
based on archive material supplied by Hughes associate Robert Mahue, who would serve as a consultant on the film. “I’ve been fascinated by Hughes ever since I came to Hollywood in the sixties,” said Friedkin, then preparing to direct Tommy Lee Jones (who had, coincidentally, portrayed the title character in the 1977 TV movie
The Amazing Howard Hughes)
in
The Hunted.
“He is a kind of King Lear — without the daughters. There are so many stories: his genius as a visionary, the weird Hollywood saga, how he transformed Vegas, how he revised the airline industry — and, of course, the sex.”

Friedkin went on to reveal that he intended to begin the epic biopic, which he admitted could run to three hours, with Hughes as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who, upon his father’s death, inherits the family business, the Hughes Tool Co. Asked about casting, Friedkin listed the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Edward Norton — all of whom were already attached to, or hovering around, other Hughes projects. At the time, Friedkin was embroiled in a court battle over profits for Warner Bros’
The Exorcist,
and the fact that the rights to Hack’s book had been purchased by Warner Bros subsidiary Castle Rock suggested that the film might find a home there. Within a few months, however, Friedkin had ceded the director’s chair to writer-director Christopher Nolan, who had followed his mind-bending
Memento
with
a star-studded remake of Scandinavian thriller
Insomnia.
“It was the extreme nature of his story [that attracted me],” Nolan told
SF Chronicle.
“Here was someone who had everything and nothing at the same time.” Speaking to
christophernolan.com
, he added, “It’s about the extremes to which one man can live — the glamour, the wealth, then the claustrophobic unhappiness.”

Nolan set to work on the script after
Insomnia
wrapped, only mildly concerned about the legacy of unproduced Howard Hughes scripts. “It is the sort of great unmade Hollywood movie, and if you ask me why, I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” Nolan stated. “But I think casting is a large part of it, and I think Jim Carrey is just perfect for the role. He’ll be able to pull off something I don’t think many performers could.” Speaking to
The Calgary Sun,
he added, “Jim was born to play Hughes. He has this amazing gift to channel real people. I’m convinced his Howard Hughes will be every bit as astonishing as his Andy Kaufman was in
Man on the Moon.”
As Carrey himself told
Entertainment Weekly,
“In certain ways, I probably am him. I want to find out what personal chasm needed to be filled — his ‘Rosebud’,” he added, a reference to the obsessive subject of Orson Welles’
Citizen Kane.
“Hughes is like everyone else, trying to find that thing you’re missing, but it’s in the fire and you have to let it go, you don’t go on and you don’t grow up.”

When Carrey became attached to the Christopher Nolan project, Michael Mann decided to step aside as director of the John Logan-scripted Howard Hughes film, to which Leonardo DiCaprio had remained attached since Mann had brought it to New Line from Disney two years earlier. Mann’s decision allowed director Martin Scorsese, then busy directing DiCaprio in
Gangs of New York,
to take over as pilot of the Hughes project, newly titled
The Aviator.
As
Variety
reported it, “Mann apparently agreed to step aside as director because the Carrey-Nolan project looked ready to go, and he didn’t want to hold up the DiCaprio pic; when their first choice, Scorsese, said yes, his decision was made easier.” Scorsese’s love of old Hollywood made him a natural choice as director of a film about Hughes’ Hollywood years. And yet, as he later told
Variety,
“I was never, like so many others, obsessed with Howard Hughes.” It was DiCaprio, he said, who brought the script to his attention during the shooting of
Gangs of New York,
“but by page three of the screenplay I knew this was a film I had to do.”

By early 2002, the race between the various competing Hughes projects had been won, with
The Aviator
having emerged as the front-runner, thanks to a financing deal struck between Miramax, Warner Bros and IEG (which also co-financed
Ali
and
Gangs of New York)
to back the $100 million-plus
picture, which amassed an impressive supporting cast, including Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Alec Baldwin, John C. Reilly, Alan Alda and even pop star Gwen Stefani (as Jean Harlow). Although
The Aviator
won five Academy Awards from eleven nominations — including a Best Actor nod for DiCaprio as Hughes — the film was hardly a financial success, and did not inspire many Hollywood studios to fast-track their own Howard Hughes properties.

One exception was Mark Gordon’s long-gestating film adaptation of
The Hoax,
released to widespread critical acclaim in 2007, with Richard Gere portraying Clifford Irving for director Lasse Hallström. In the meantime, even the success of
Batman Begins, The Dark Knight
and
Inception
didn’t empower director Christopher Nolan to get his own Howard Hughes film off the ground, although rumours persist that he might make it after
The Dark Knight Rises,
for release in 2014 — giving
The Aviator
a ten-year-wide berth. “There’s no sense of any kind of race,” the director told The Z Review, “simply because it’s too difficult a subject. And I think that’s why these projects have tended not to happen in the past. Any time you go into making a film there are other factors around and you just have to believe in the project you are doing, that it will find its way to get made.” Nevertheless, David Koepp, who has described his own project,
Mr Hughes,
as “deader than a doornail,” suggests that there might still be room for his own film to be made at some point in the future — especially if he can get Johnny Depp, now a
bona fide
box office star, on board. After all, he says, “Stranger things have happened, many of which are documented in
Mr Hughes!”

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1
It was later followed by a 3D Russell vehicle,
The French Line,
which, the ads promised, would “knock both your eyes out!”

“The
Sandman
movie is in Development Hell and may it rot there forever.”

— Neil Gaiman

I
n September 1987, DC Comics editor Karen Berger called Neil Gaiman, one of the UK’s most promising comic talents, and asked if he would be interested in writing a monthly title for the publisher. Berger had edited Gaiman’s
Black Orchid,
a lavish comic book miniseries illustrated by the author’s friend and collaborator Dave McKean; now she proposed reviving a long-forgotten DC character, ‘the Sandman’, and taking him in a radical new direction.

After a few false starts, Gaiman finally arrived at the premise and characters which would, over the course of the series’ seventy-five-issue lifetime (not counting a few additional stories in prose and sequential form published outside of the ongoing monthly title), become familiar to millions of fans worldwide: the Sandman — also known as Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, the Dream-King, or sometimes simply Dream — is the personification of the dream world where we spend a third of our lives; older and more powerful than the gods, he is also one of the seven ‘Endless’: the others being his brothers Destiny and Destruction, and sisters Death, Desire, Delirium and Despair. Early collaborators, including artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, colourist Robbie Busch, letterer and logo designer Todd Klein and cover artist Dave McKean, helped shape the many and varied
worlds of
The Sandman,
while many others — including Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Steve Parkhouse, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Jill Thompson, Vince Locke and Daniel Vozzo — would help to carry the series through its seven-year life cycle.