Tales From Development Hell (23 page)

At least one person appeared to believe that de Souza had made a successful bid for the project. Although he had been lauded for his acting performance in
Cop Land,
Sylvester Stallone’s career had suffered a slump in the decade following 1993’s
Cliffhanger,
the box office performances of films like
Judge Dredd, Get Carter, Driven
and
D-Tox
being indicative of a precipitous downturn in his popularity. What he needed was a sure-fire comeback film like Schwarzenegger’s
Terminator 3.
“Sometime in late 2002 or early 2003 I went to a dinner party, and Sly was there, with his manager,” de Souza recalls. “I started to think that the reason I was invited to this dinner party
was because they thought I controlled the rights to the
ISOBAR
script. The conversation turned in a very clumsy fashion to that project, you know: ‘We should make that now. I’m ready to do that now.’” It was not to be. Although Stallone’s star would recover some of its former sheen, thanks to the critical and commercial success of
Rocky Balboa
and, to a lesser degree,
Rambo,
he no longer boasted the box office clout to get something as expensive as
ISOBAR
into cinemas.

In fact, the rights to the
ISOBAR
project wound up in the hands of two of its longest-term fans: Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who had by now scored big with
Stargate
for MGM and
Independence Day
for Fox, and were about to make their first film under a new deal with Sony Pictures. Aware that all interests in the
ISOBAR
property were about to be auctioned for what amount to cents on the dollar, with all debts forgiven, Emmerich and Devlin persuaded Sony to buy it for them. In the wake of the box office disappointment
Godzilla
— if $379 million worldwide can be described as disappointing — the pair had failed to launch
Supertanker,
a disaster movie about a gigantic ship filled with natural gas which terrorists use to hold San Diego to ransom, nor a big-budget remake of the sci-fi classic
Fantastic Voyage.
Both projects had been written by Tab Murphy, best known as screenwriter of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Atlantis: The Lost Continent
and
Brother Bear
for Disney, and as writer-director of
Last of the Dogmen.
As Murphy recalls, “I met Roland and Dean when they were in Yuma, Arizona, making
Stargate,
which was produced by Joel Michaels, who also produced
Last of the Dogmen.
Joel suggested that I hang out on the set of
Stargate,
and we all became friends.”

It was Devlin who suggested Murphy take a pass at
Supertanker
to try to jump start that project, and subsequently brought him on to write the update of
Fantastic Voyage.
“Then they had me write a script based on an original idea of Roland’s, a science fiction story set on a savage planet where these guys come and have a hunting expedition every year to hunt the monsters. It was a big, fun tentpole movie. And that’s, ultimately, what led to
ISOBAR.”
Says Devlin, “Tab was the first person I hired to do a rewrite after we got the rights out of bankruptcy. He’s one of my favourite writers. We’ve worked with him three or four times now, and think he’s terrific, really talented. And you couldn’t meet a nicer guy in Hollywood.”

Murphy believes this would have been a few years after de Souza’s involvement, and certainly after 2001, when Emmerich and Devlin parted company, the latter setting up an umbrella company for future projects, Electric Entertainment. “They had kind of gone their separate ways at that point,” says Murphy, “but they had agreed that there were certain projects they would work on together.
ISOBAR
was one of them. It was a back-burner project for them, which they wanted to re-activate, so suddenly there was a big push.” Murphy visited Devlin at Electric Entertainment’s offices, looked at all of the pre-production artwork, read de Souza’s draft, and discussed the producer’s objectives for the first
ISOBAR
script of the twenty-first century. “Then I went off and wrote a draft that actually wasn’t very well received,” Murphy recalls. “I think it had to do with the lead character, whom I had written as a very hardbitten, cynical sort of anti-hero, which wasn’t what they were looking for. Then I wrote another draft which they were happy with.”

Murphy’s second draft, entitled
The ISOBAR Run,
begins with a view of the Earth from space. “But something is terribly wrong. The entire surface of Mother Earth is covered with a dirty brown haze, the atmosphere stagnant and poisonous, familiar land formations barely discernible. We are looking at a dead planet.” The script then cuts to ‘Old Los Angeles — 2097,’ where ‘bedos’ scratch for a living on the toxic surface, at the mercy not only of disease and starvation, but also regular murderous sweeps by bio-suited ‘science cops.’ “Healthy living through genocide,” mutters Prine, a new recruit, sardonically, before rescuing a twelve-year-old urchin, Ollie, from death by cleanup squad. Below ground, in ‘New Los Angeles,’ society is flourishing, with “streets filled with electric cars that crisscross a labyrinth of low buildings as far as the eye can see. Artificial lighting lends an eerie fluorescent glow to the atmosphere.” Prine and Ollie are about to witness the maiden voyage of the ‘ISOBAR Mark V,’
³
a floating supertrain linking North America with Asia through a tunnel at up to 2,000 kilometres per hour. Prine follows Ollie onto the train, which leaves with both of them on board.

As in de Souza’s version, the inaugural ride of the Los Angeles-Hawaii-Tokyo run boasts a motley assortment of passengers, in the classic disaster movie mold; for more obscure reasons, it is also being used to transport a secret, deadly cargo: “a highly mobile plant hybrid, an aggressive organism capable of hunting down water in arid conditions, much like a predator hunts down its prey.” Naturally, the creature gets loose on the train, killing anyone it encounters and sucking them dry of the thing it feeds on: water. As the train hurtles towards Hawaii, its first stop, the creature continues to
cause chaos, building a dense jungle of vines and webbing in which it ‘stores’ victims, reminiscent of the deleted cocoon sequence from
Alien,
which was re-engineered in
Aliens.
“The men watch with a mixture of astonishment and horror as the room turns into a living jungle. The creature’s webbing soon covers every last inch of surface area, creating an alien, otherworldly environment.”
⁴
Along the way, the creature causes sufficient structural damage for the train to crash, just before it reaches Hawaii. Now, not only is the ISOBAR on its inaugural journey, with a deadly escaped plant and a stowaway on board, it’s also
a runaway train!
With half of the train’s thousand passengers dead and many of the rest injured, Prine discovers that the creature has the potential to replenish the Earth’s stagnant oxygen supply within ten years — assuming it isn’t killed first. Can Prine risk destroying the creature, even if it represents mankind’s only hope of returning to the surface?
⁵

“What we asked Tab to do was try and update the version that Roland and I had written together,” says Devlin, “because we’d only ever done a first draft, we’d never really gotten to ‘write it out.’ When Tab came in, we were like, ‘Let’s really flesh this thing out the way we want to do it,’ and he did. He did a great job at it.” Murphy’s advantage, he says, was that the conceptual artwork was on hand to inspire the writing. “Tab had all of Roland’s artwork. I’ve got at least forty paintings of what the world looks like, some of whom he’d done with Dante Ferretti, and others with people he had worked with since Germany. It was Roland’s idea to turn the train into a kind of
Titanic
— this five-storey über-train, designed to look like it came out of the 1920s. And then of course this is supposed to take place in a world that exists underground. So it’s got this amazing design element to it.”

Hopes that Murphy’s take on the material might finally get
ISOBAR
the green light proved unfounded. “I never really heard the ins and outs of how aggressively they tried to get it set up and made, but I just know it was going to be an expensive movie — $120 million at the time, although I think he was trying to get it down to $80 million.” Says Devlin, “it was a $90 million movie back in 1991, so it would be more like $200 million today.” In the wake of his and Emmerich’s post
-Patriot
split, Devlin was having a difficult time getting anything made: while Emmerich went on to direct such mega-budget films
as
The Day After Tomorrow, 2012
and
10,000 B.C.,
Devlin’s output as producer had been somewhat lower profile, including the documentary
Who Killed the Electric Car?,
the
bona fide
box office flop
Flyboys
and TNT’s television series
Leverage.
Nevertheless, says Devlin, “We brought it out to Cannes, in about 2007, and much to our surprise all the buyers remembered it from way back when, so suddenly we had all these very high numbers for foreign sales, almost enough to go out and make the picture without anybody attached. But at the end of the day we weren’t able to get all the financing together, so I put it back into my refrigerator, and we’ve just kept working on it.”

More recently, Devlin found himself working with Marco Schnabel, who had graduated from crew member on the Austin Powers films to director of Mike Myers’ unloved comedy
The Love Guru,
and written two TV movie sequels for actor Noah Wyle (and producer Devlin):
The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines
(2006) and
The Librarian III: The Curse of the Judas Chalice
(2008). “We started talking about
ISOBAR,”
says Devlin, “and Marco just had this idea, this concept, that would make it much more emotional in the third act. And I just loved it, so I said, ‘Take a shot at it.’ We hired him, and he did. It was always fun, and the latest draft has all the fun, but now it’s more emotional.”

In the years since Stallone was on board, action heroes have evolved, with brains and heart winning out over muscle and firepower. Two decades after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and one-time
ISOBAR
star Sylvester Stallone ruled, the new box office champions are Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Robert Downey Jr. According to Devlin,
ISOBAR
’s central role reflects that change. “It’s a much grittier character now,” he says, “and it doesn’t have to be an action hero. What it has to be is someone who can carry the depth of the character because he’s going through a lot and he’s reliving a crisis in his life that happened years earlier, so it’s pretty tough. To me, someone like Clive Owen would be amazing.

“I think it’s a great project,” he adds, “and I still intend on making it. I’m still very optimistic that we’re going to get this thing going in the next couple of years.”

___________

1
Species
director Roger Donaldson ultimately used the train as part of Sil’s dream, giving science fiction fans their only chance to see what might have been if Scott had decided to board
The Train.

2
The scientific principle, at least, was sound: a vacuum-propelled locomotive developed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel was in use for some time, until the amount of sealant required to constantly re-seal the vacuum tubes running along the centre rail began to reach impractical levels, and the whole system was scrapped.

3
Murphy’s draft unscrambles the acronym to ‘Intercontinental Superconducting Oscillating Ballistic Automatic Railway’, in place of Uhls’ ‘Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway.’

4
Reminiscent of the mutated ‘Plant 42’ in
Resident Evil.

5
The answer, of course, is ‘Yes.’ The scientists who created it could presumably make another one using the same formula.

“I had lots of people calling me up to say it’s one of the best scripts they ever read, but of course they wouldn’t be making it. People say that to you all the time, even about dreck, but this time I kind of believed them.”

— screenwriter David Koepp on his unproduced script
Mr Hughes

C
onsidering the name Howard Hughes is as synonymous with Hollywood as it is with wealth, eccentricity and aviation — and crackpot schemes combining all three — it is surprising that more films have not been made about the famously reclusive billionaire.

Not that Hollywood hasn’t tried, however: in the decades between Jonathan Demme’s
Melvin and Howard
(1980) and Martin Scorsese’s
The Aviator
(2004), at least half a dozen directors of equal prominence, many of them with a more commercial track record than Messrs Demme and Scorsese, saw their own diverse Howard Hughes projects wither on the Hollywood vine. Nevertheless, the fact that so many tried, and failed, to bring to the screen their own vision, or version, of Hughes’ multi-faceted life is testament to Hollywood’s fascination with a man who, at one time, produced a plethora of films, bedded a string of starlets, and even ran a movie studio of his own. As
Variety
columnist, author and former studio head Peter Bart said recently, “Who else could have taken on the censors, the Mafia, the studio power elite and virtually every nubile star and starlet and still survive?” Well, almost.