Tales From Development Hell (8 page)

Without realizing it, Jaffa and Silver had set themselves a breathtakingly ambitious goal: to tell the origin story of the entire
Planet of the Apes
franchise, primarily by dealing with the two key questions: firstly, where did the intelligent, talking apes come from; secondly, where did all the people go? “We said, ‘Let’s look at what’s going on in the world right now in terms of culture and science, that certain dominoes could line up, and if they should touch each other in just the right way, apes would take over the planet. And let’s try to tell that story, but also use the
Planet of the Apes
mythology to do that.” Directed by Rupert Wyatt, best known in his native England for well-received prison drama
The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
¹
tells the story of Will (Academy Award nominee James Franco), a scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, who injects Caesar, a baby chimpanzee, with an experimental serum, unwittingly sparking a chain of events which unleashes an army of intelligent apes on San Francisco. Although the film bore superficial similarities to certain events from
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,
Jaffa and Silver claimed this was coincidental. As Jaffa explained to
Entertainment Weekly,
“We laid out the story and pitched the idea to Fox, and had gotten hired, and okayed to write and produce this thing. It was at that point we went back and started studying the old movies. We already had the
movie laid out. I think some of the connections to
Conquest
are on purpose,” he added, “but others are coincidental. ‘Unlikely character becoming a leader and leading his people to freedom’ — it’s also a Moses story.”

In the run-up to its release on 7 August 2011, Fox predicted that
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
would gross somewhere in the neighbourhood of $35 million in its opening weekend; as it turned out, the film vastly exceeded the studio’s expectations, grossing nearly $55 million — and almost the same again the following weekend. A sequel to the prequel was not only likely, but certain. “When we started this,” Silver told
Entertainment Weekly,
“we knew that this movie would stand on its own, and we designed it that way. But... we pictured a trilogy that would start with this movie. We definitely have ideas for where the sequel — plural, where the
sequels
— would take us.”

______________

1
The original title,
Rise of the Apes,
was changed in the run-up to release, as Fox felt audiences may not realize it was intended as part of the
Planet of the Apes
franchise.

“When Gandalf is vanquished, the text is ‘He fell beyond time and memory’. We puzzled about how you put that on film.”

— director John Boorman on his proposed adaptation

“I
n a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With these words, impulsively scribbled on a piece of paper by thirty-eight year-old Oxford languages professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the greatest fantasy epic in the history of literature was born. Although
The Hobbit,
as the resulting story would eventually be titled, was written largely for Tolkien’s own children, it found its way to publisher Allen & Unwin, and appeared in 1937. It sold well; well enough that Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel. Thirteen years later, ‘J.R.R.’ Tolkien, renowned as a perfectionist and self-professed procrastinator, was ready to deliver it. “My work has escaped from my control,” he wrote to his publisher in 1950, “and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” Its title was
The Lord of the Rings.

It was a further four years before Allen & Unwin finally published the book, an epic saga set in a fictional world called Middle-Earth. Divided, much to the author’s annoyance, into three parts entitled
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers
and
The Return of the King,
the book sold moderately well, particularly for a thousand-page trilogy of hardcover doorstops which, unable to fit comfortably into any existing genre, had invented one all its own. Nevertheless, it did not begin to enjoy the kind of success one can describe
as phenomenal until the mid-1960s, when Ace Books (home of Philip K. Dick and Tolkien-inspired fantasist Ursula K. Le Guin) and Ballantine published rival editions of the book. By this time, American youth was in the midst of being caught up in hippie culture, and the quiet Oxford don suddenly found his story about hobbits, elves, dwarfs and wizards selling hundreds of thousands of copies per month, and becoming — almost overnight — required reading for a generation of psychedelic explorers.

With a vast readership stretching from middle England to the Midwestern United States, one would have expected Hollywood to come knocking on the door of his study, the cigar smoke of a producer mingling with that of Tolkien’s beloved pipe as he signed away the film rights to his masterpiece. In fact, Hollywood had been ahead of the curve, with Hugo award-winning science fiction fan, writer and magazine editor Forrest J Ackerman — the man credited with being the first to abbreviate science fiction to ‘sci-fi’ — approaching Tolkien as early as 1957. Ackerman made his appeal in person, flying to London and taking the train to Oxford. “I had no sooner landed in London than an hour later I was in the drawing room of Professor Tolkien,” he recalls. “There were two young lady fans who went with me. The Professor talked to us with a pipe in his mouth, and holding his head kind of down, and a very thick accent, and when the two girls and I got back on the train we were saying, ‘What did he say? Did you understand anything?’ We only understood about one word in five!” Nevertheless, he adds, “He gave me permission for a year to try to find a movie producer for it.”

Ackerman’s ambitious plan was to make a live-action film, rather than taking the animated approach Tolkien would have preferred. “I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization,” Tolkien wrote to his publisher Rayner Unwin on 19 June 1957, “and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.” Referring to an earlier bowdlerization of the book for a dramatised reading produced for radio by the BBC, he added, “I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC.” Although a writing associate of Ackerman’s, Morton Grady Zimmerman, set to work on a treatment for the proposed film, while production designer Ron Cobb began scouting suitable locations in California, Ackerman found it difficult to interest the few producers he knew in such an ambitious undertaking. “I had gone to school with James Nicholson, who was the president of American International Pictures, and I thought perhaps that he would be interested,” he says, “but the scope was
too great for him. I no longer recall just who else I approached, but nobody obviously was prepared to produce it at that time.”

In April 1958, Tolkien admitted in a letter to Unwin that he was “entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it.” He had recently received Zimmerman’s synopsis of the book, described as a “story-line”, and while Tolkien claimed ignorance of the adaptation process, he did know the difference between a film ‘treatment’ and what he saw as ill treatment. “This document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety,” he wrote, adding that Zimmerman seemed “quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent,” he went on. “He does not
read
books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the
[Lord of the Rings]
at a great pace, and then constructed his [storyline] from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original.”

Tolkien, a lifelong philologist, was principally peeved with the constant misspelling of Boromir as ‘Borimor,’ but there were other slights, and overall Tolkien felt “very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original.” Nevertheless, there was one redeeming feature about the whole affair, and it was an obvious one. “I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money,” he wrote, referring to his encroaching retirement, and promising to restrain himself, “and avoid all avoidable offence.” In a letter to Ackerman circa June 1958, Tolkien begged understanding of “the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.” Although hardly an avowed cinemagoer, Tolkien understood the medium well enough to note that “the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of an unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” His commentary on Zimmerman’s synopsis was thorough in scope and condemnatory in tone. “He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.”

Bryan Sibley, author of a later (and widely acclaimed) BBC radio adaptation of
The Lord of the Rings
and the official ‘making of’ books for Peter Jackson’s
trilogy, believes that some of Tolkien’s criticism may have been unfair. “The problem was that, because Tolkien was not a regular moviegoer, he didn’t understand the problems of dramatisation,” he told
Starlog.
“One of his chief criticisms of [the] treatment was that he had arranged the books in chronological order. It’s actually something that you have to do if you’re going to construct a screenplay out of what is essentially a novel.”

Nevertheless, despite the considerable efforts of Ackerman et al to convince Tolkien that his story was in safe hands, the proposed adaptation withered on the vine, and no firm agreement was ever made. “I think it was just as well,” Ackerman admits, “because it could never have been given the grand treatment that Peter Jackson afforded it.” Ackerman did, however, manage to produce another adaptation of the book. “I edited 200 issues of
Famous Monsters of Filmland,”
he says, “and the man who produced those issues saw a value in Tolkien. As I recall he had me do a one-shot comic book based on it. I had already created a comic strip character called Vampirella, so he had me create a one-shot on a portion of the Tolkien stories.” There was another, more surprising consolation for Ackerman: a cameo role in Peter Jackson’s early splatter film
Braindead,
aka
Dead Alive.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, work was underway on an animated adaptation of Tolkien’s earlier work,
The Hobbit,
thanks to the foresight of producer Bill Snyder, who, in 1964, optioned the rights for a period extending to 30 June 1966, handing the task of adaptation to legendary animator Gene Deitch. “After reading the book, I caught the fever,” Deitch recalled in his autobiography
How to Succeed in Animation (Don’t Let A Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!),
“and intensively began working up a screenplay... The great sweep of the adventure, the fabled landscapes, and the treasure of fantasy characters, made the story a natural for animation.” Incredibly, Deitch and his writing partner, Bill Bernal, were well into the screenplay when they heard, for the first time, of the existence of
The Lord of the Rings.
“Having assumed there was only
The Hobbit
to contend with, and following Snyder’s wish, we had taken some liberties with the story that a few years later would be grounds for burning at the stake,” Deitch admitted. These changes included changing some of the characters’ names, playing fast and loose with the plot — even creating a love interest, a Princess, no less — for Bilbo Baggins. Having read
The Lord of the Rings,
Deitch and Bernal realised that they were dealing with something “far more magnificent” than
The Hobbit,
and set about retro-fitting elements from the later works into their script, to allow for a potential sequel. They even conceived a ground-breaking animation method they christened
‘ImagiMation’, which would combine cel-animated figures over elaborate 3D model backgrounds, in the style of some techniques pioneered by animation genius Max Fleischer.

In January 1966, Deitch was invited to America to make a presentation to 20th Century Fox. “By the time we arrived, however, Snyder had already blown the deal by asking [Fox] for too much money.” Evidently, word of
The Lord of the Rings’
groundswell of success had not reached the ears of Fox executives. By the time they did, Snyder found himself with an ace in the hole: according to the paperwork for the film rights to
The Hobbit,
all Snyder had to do in order to hold an option, also covering
The Lord of the Rings,
was produce “a full-colour motion picture version” of
The Hobbit
by 30 June 1966. Nowhere in the contract did it state that the film must be animated, or feature length, or even produced to a high standard. As a mortified Deitch explained, “All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay — all my previous year’s work — hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within twelve minutes’ running time — one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before 30 June 1966.”