Tales From Development Hell (27 page)

“I watched Sandman, my great epic comics opus, go through traditional development hell,” Gaiman later told Neil Rosser, producer of a BBC Radio documentary adapted from the first edition of this book, “beginning with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the great writers who did
Pirates of the Caribbean
and such, doing these really very good drafts of a script which the producer at the time, Jon Peters, famously did not ‘get’. Roger Avary was brought on as director and he did a draft of their script, again it was very good, he went in, he showed them Jan Svankmayer’s
Alice
and said, ‘I want the dreamy sequences to look like this,’ and was fired. And then scripts came in and they got worse and worse.”

Following Avary’s departure, a new writer was brought aboard to start over: William Farmer, who had impressed the
Sandman
producers with his (then unproduced) script adaptation of another comic book,
Jonah Hex.
²
Although a fan of
Jonah Hex,
Farmer admits he wasn’t at all familiar with
The Sandman.
“I read the graphic novel called
Preludes & Nocturnes,
and some of the comics,” he says. “I found them to be very imaginative but undisciplined, as comics often are. I don’t mean that to be condescending. What I mean by that is, comics are generally free to take flights of fancy without the cumbersome weight of a three-act structure, since the story can presumably just go on and on and on. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s what the medium calls for. But it’s not a movie.

“I was working for Jon Peters’ company,” he adds, “though I only met the man in passing. I’m sure he had no idea what was going on with the story and didn’t care. The producers were Alan Riche and Tony Ludwig, who went on to do
Mouse Hunt
and
Deep Blue Sea.
But they weren’t really involved in the story development; they were basically just standing by listening to story conferences, trying to decide how much the thing was going to cost, where to shoot it — practical production concerns. The actual story executives I was working with on a day-to-day basis I won’t name. They know who they are. They’re parts in a machine, and I’m sure they’ve all gone on to take different slots in other machines by now.

“Basically, it was clear from the start that the goal of the project was to take the
Sandman
name and use it as a franchise, while making the actual story something more ‘for the masses’. So I was essentially brought in to do a whole new story that would simply be called
Sandman.”
Farmer read the most recent draft, by Roger Avary, which he found “interesting, but in the studio’s opinion — and I must admit, in mine as well — absolutely unfilmable. A very twisted and surreal kind of thing you might have been able to do in the ’70s, not the ’90s. No studio would have touched that version. I had some ideas that were very loyal to the source material,” he explains, “yet would tweak things here and there to make it more of an audience picture. But there were things the producers wanted done with it that took it in a different direction, and as I was a fledgling screenwriter, I figured you take the suggestions of the ones writing the cheques.” This, he admits, turned out to be a mistake — personally and for the project.

“Things were forced into it that really didn’t belong there,” he explains. “The producers were adamant that the coming Millennium must play a big role. Every film in development at that time had some damn thing to do with the Millennium. Of course this was folly, as the Millennium turned out to be no big deal, in the real world
or
in film — nobody really gave a shit. So it was a case of trying to bring my ‘vision’ to the project, but the range
of that vision was squeezed into an increasingly narrow field by things the producers insisted must be in there. For example, one executive producer insisted, for reasons I’ll never understand, that there be a scene of Morpheus in a rave club. Don’t ask me why. There was no place for it and I can say with a tiny amount of pride that I at least refused to write
that
one.”

At one point, Farmer recalls positing the idea of meeting with Neil Gaiman to discuss things. “The reply was basically, ‘Nah, we don’t need to get him involved.’” Besides, as Gaiman told Ain’t It Cool News in 1998, “Where
The Sandman
movie is concerned, I’d rather not get involved. No one should be made to barbecue their own baby.” Farmer says that he wrote several drafts between 1997 and 1998. “When all was said and done, and we had the definite draft of my involvement, they were ecstatic. They were talking about a big franchise, this thing would be huge, blah blah blah... Of course everyone knew the source material had been massacred, but nobody really cared. It wasn’t about that, it was about a product name.”

While Farmer’s approach found favour with the producers and the studio,
Sandman
fans felt their worst nightmares were coming true when a review of his script appeared on Ain’t It Cool News, written by ‘Moriarty’. “Mistake number one: the whole thing is tied to the Millennium,” he wrote. “That’s rapidly becoming one of the most heinous, preposterous clichés in film. Stop it. By the time you get this thing finished and in theaters, even if you started right now, the year 1999 will essentially be over... The best quality of Gaiman’s work is its timelessness. Don’t make the mistake of grafting some momentary gimmick onto what’s already so good. Mistake number two: did you actually read any issues of the book, Mr Farmer, or were you doing the evil bidding of Jon Peters himself? And if the answer is the latter, then tell me, does Mr Peters in fact have horns and cloven hooves? The soft skull’s a given, but I’m trying to figure out if he has any real malice in his heart. After all, he’s currently working overtime to destroy one of America’s finest icons, Superman, and now he’s actively mauling one of the few examples of true graphic literature. This is one of those cases where changes are made for the sake of making changes, as a matter of ego, and not for any sort of sound dramatic reasons.”

Moriarty went on to summarise Farmer’s story outline: “Rose Kendall is the daughter of wealthy industrialist and all around Really Famous Wacko Harlan Kendall. When she was very young, her father used her in some nutty experiment in which he killed her, opened the Dream Gate, captured Dream, then brought her back to life. In doing so, he also managed to
take the ruby, the bag of sand, and the helmet. So far — well, it’s at least vaguely recognizable. The Kendalls are new, but at least we’ve got Morpheus imprisoned and the icons of his office being scattered. Rose is afflicted with lifelong nightmares in which the man from her dreams asks to be released. Finally, just a few days before the Millennium, Rose is attacked by someone yelling about the Nightmare Man. She’s taken to a hospital where she has an encounter with someone vaguely like Gaiman’s Death (although with far more ‘zany’ wisecracks) and an ‘Angel’ appears, coming through from another world when Rose dies briefly on the table. Nice how she keeps doing that, eh? He takes away her nightmares and disappears.

“Back at the building her father built, there’s some sort of construction going on and the secret magic chamber where Kendall stuck Morpheus is found and blown up, releasing Morpheus. And here’s where things really go wrong, since the character that is released is a fairly indiscriminate killer with no real power of any kind. He beats some people up, jumps off something, gets hurt, and gets taken to the hospital. Morpheus. Lord of Dreams. Gets taken to a hospital after yelling tripe like, ‘As though your puny weapons could harm Morpheus! The lord of sleep! The Sandman!’” (Farmer subsequently contacted the website Comics 2 Film to deny the claim: “The horrible line ... has NEVER been typed by the fingers of yours truly,” and declare that “this was not at all the tone of my script for Warners.”)

“Well, of course the hospital that Morpheus is brought to just happens to be the same one Rose is in,” Moriarty continued, “and suddenly we’re in lame
Terminator 2
rip-off country, with Morpheus going to look for Rose, and the Angel appearing again to save her. The twist here is that Morpheus is trying to kill Rose to save the world, while the Angel is actually The Corinthian, Morpheus’ brother, who has bet Lucifer, their other brother, that he can find the icons of Dream’s office first. Whoever gets them before the year 2000 wins. If neither does, then Lucifer takes over the earth for torture, misery, sorrow, yadda, yadda, yadda. Really. That’s really the story. And the rest of the film’s just a dumb action film with these two fighting over and over, and with them beating up people to get the various items. The ruby’s in a safe in a pawn shop. The sand’s in the study of Rose’s house. And the helmet? Well... giggle, giggle... dare I say it? It’s hidden inside Rose!”

Perhaps understandably, Moriarty took umbrage at what he saw as the wholesale reinterpretation — or, at best, misunderstanding — of Gaiman’s
magnum opus.
The Corinthian and Lucifer as Morpheus’ brothers? A character called Love as his sister? And an ending in which it was all just a dream?
“Gaiman never, never cheated us like that. Even if something happened in a dream, it mattered. It counted. That’s the whole point. Our dream lives and our waking lives are one and the same. One affects the other. Gaiman made the point over and over, and Farmer has ignored it utterly.” Although Farmer had created a ‘nightmare plague’ loosely based on the ’24 Hours’ issue of
Preludes & Nocturnes,
Moriarty dismissed the idea as “nothing but a bunch of pointless atrocities without moral heft or payoff.” Overall, he added, “[Farmer] misses everything that makes the original work so unique, so special, so brilliant.”

Gaiman agreed, describing Farmer’s script as “the worst one yet. It was just sort of nonsensical, poorly written trash,” he told the
Philadelphia City Paper.
“These are not people who particularly care about
Sandman,”
he added. “They want it to be the new
Batman & Robin,
which is a little like deciding you want to make
David Copperfield
the new
Batman & Robin.”
To Andy Mangels, Gaiman claimed that the script was “not only the worst
Sandman
script so far, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read. That was sad, especially when it’s something like
Sandman
which you love and you’ve been close to all these years and then you read this nonsense.” Speaking with the BBC’s Neil Rosser, Gaiman added: “Films carry with them a certain amount of fear because if you say ‘Yes’ to something and you’re wrong, you’re out on your ear, whereas if you say ‘No’ to something, you’re never going to get into trouble, [especially] if everything is always defensible. So you wind up in development with people trying to make things more like things they know, because that is a defensible position: you will probably not get fired for it. Unfortunately that’s why you wind up with films that look like other films.”

Gaiman wasn’t sure what to make of the latest script. “It was very obvious that whoever wrote it had never read any Sandman, and had no understanding of what it was about, and basically had sat somewhere while people said, ‘This is what we want this thing to be,’” he recalls. “It was so offensive and stupid that when the people from Jon Peters’ office phoned me, I found myself being honest with them in a way that you never are with Hollywood people because they don’t like honesty and they don’t quite know how to deal with it. I said ‘I thought it was awful, actually.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the thing we did where we made the Corinthian character the Sandman’s brother, you must have thought that was great.’ And I said, ‘No, that was one of the most deeply stupid things, one of the many awful things...’ and told them for a while how bad I thought it was without repeating myself or stopping for breath for about fifteen minutes, and at the end of it they
put down the phone and I thought to myself that’s the last time they’ll ever send me a script or tell me what was going on, and it was indeed. I think they figured I wasn’t a team player and didn’t ‘get’ that whole Sandman thing.”

Farmer responded to Gaiman’s public trashing of his screenplay by contacting the website Coming Attractions with an appeal to
Sandman
fans: “If any of you are waiting for Mr Gaiman’s esoteric ‘opus’ to arrive on screen intact, forget it,” he wrote. “A hardcore gaggle of fans would no doubt attend, but hardly enough to support the $100 mil budget that would doubtless be required. The best that can be hoped for is a reworking of the source material which retains the concepts, but makes them more accessible to a mainstream audience. I feel that my script was successful in this endeavour; it’s unfortunate Mr Gaiman doesn’t agree.” Suggesting that Gaiman was unlikely to be satisfied with
any
screenplay which the studio might consider produceable, he added: “I did my best, only to join five or six others in the growing ranks of the ‘Screenwriters of
Sandman’
club. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not this troubled project ever gets off the ground. And just to set the record straight,” he concluded, “my version of
Sandman
didn’t have one fistfight in it.”

Farmer now says that he has “mixed feelings” about the Internet trashing of his script: “I couldn’t blame
Sandman
fans for being upset; of course this was how they would react. But the personal nature of the attacks was a little un-called for, in my opinion. Gaiman used the word ‘idiot’ in one interview I read, and said that the script was not only the worst
Sandman
[script], but the worst screenplay of any kind he had ever read. I can of course understand the former statement, but the latter was a little harsh. Taken on its own, the script was intelligent and well written, if I do say so myself. Of course it mangled
Sandman;
I would never argue that.” Farmer says that he would probably have been hurt more by the attacks if he had believed in the script himself; as it was, “I never really considered it ‘my script’. It was a big monster written by committee, and I just happened to be the schmuck being paid to make the whole thing read like a script and sign my name to it. So while I did not exactly like being called names, I couldn’t very well get on the Internet and say, ‘Hey, you guys are wrong! This thing is great and we didn’t mangle
Sandman!’
Because of course, we did.