Dope Island with Charles Cassady Jr.: Bad Movies That Were Never Made

I recently listened to the audiobook (I'm trying to get hired by a local audiobook company; it's not working so far) of that hit Christian-evangelical novel The Shack. There's a passage in it in which God tells a grieving father (paraphrasing here), "Listen, kid, if you think things are bad now, you have no idea, nooooo idea, of the worse stuff, the really unimaginably ghastly horror that me, Jesus and the Holy Spirit have been busy saving the Earth from all this time while you monkeys are sitting there feeling sorry for yourselves."  Again I emphasize, my wording. The Shack doesn't really read at all like that, I don't want to give the wrong impression and interfere with anyone's getting Saved..


That things-could-be-worse sentiment reminded me; there are plenty of published laments and might-have-beens in the human endeavor that is movie making. Where budgets, market surveys, ego, talents and lack of all of the above collide in a perpetual cloud-chamber of chaos, many Major Motion Picture projects get scheduled and schemed over but never made. Some are worth mourning, perhaps - a whole documentary feature exists, LOST IN LA MANCHA, that depicts poor Terry Gilliam's attempt at an interesting variation on the Don Quixote theme, and how bad luck, poor weather, ill timing and health problems of aging star Jean Rochefort lets the whole project slip away like grains of sand between Gilliam's fingers as you watch. It's pretty sad. I have never seen it, but there's also a famed nonfiction chronicle THE EPIC THAT NEVER WAS, about the incomplete adaptation of I, CLAUDIUS with Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon. It promised to be a masterwork but eventually fell apart during production, leaving only stirring fragments. Meanwhile MARMADUKE or DIARY OF A WIMPY KID or direct-to-video BRING IT ON sequels arrive without a hitch? Kill me, now.

But there is another side. The movies that were planned but never made and sounded like such doubtful propositions that I dare say, humanity is better off, by far, for their remaining nonexistent. Nothing but a banal script in some narcissist's desk drawer, or test-footage buried in a vault. Buried by fate, hubris, or maybe God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit deciding that no! Enough already! War, plagues, holocausts, murder, tyranny and injustice, okay, We can let that slide. But not this movie. Some things are just over the line.

I culled this list principally off a USENET thread from a good many years ago, back in the days when you could just get online with a 2400 baud modem, touch others with sheer verbiage, and not need any damn pictures of dancing GIFS. Read my admittedly sketchy descriptions. Judge for yourselves if these were indeed incipient train wrecks. And if you've got any wisdom or listings of your own to add, the Comments field is open for business.

Sylvester Stallone's Edgar Allen Poe biopic - This is supposedly a script Mr. Stallone wrote in his early days and is is still carrying around. One witness who read it (a movie actor, meaning there's a heavy Hollywood-phony schmooze factor involved as long as reporters are there taking notes) pronounced the Poe script an emotional and dramatic literary masterpiece, the last thing you'd expect from the star of COBRA. Yet with all his clout, Stallone (sorry, can't ever bring myself to call this guy `Sly') has been unable to get it produced. I do not know if this was the same Edgar Allen Poe movie to which the much-surgeried, late-career Michael Jackson was said to be attached, making his big dramatic bow as the pale, tortured Baltimore poet.

DOGS - Arnold Schwarzenegger and Daryl Hannah would play dogs in love in this live-action comedy. I guess the gimmick was outsized props and things (anyone remember Martin Short in CLIFFORD?) would try to convey a house pet's perspective. I hear the main reason this didn't get made was that Schwarzenegger
and Hannah both had prior commitments to other movies. So we all owe LAST ACTION HERO a debt of gratitude.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS - Starring and directed and heavily rewritten by by Bruce Willis. I've heard that David Mamet wasn't very pleased when this started taking shape, around the time of HUDSON HAWK.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - Starring Jerry Lewis. Produced by Jerry Lewis. Directed by Jerry Lewis. Word is that Lewis was still threatening to make this as late as the late 70s, and goes a long way toward explaining why the late J.D. Salinger never officially sold the movie rights to his novel (though I think some unauthorized takeoffs such as PURPLE HAZE did make it to scattered movie screens). I dunno, as long as Lewis didn't think he could play Holden Caulfield, maybe he would have made no worse a needless adaptation than anyone else. But it does sound like a weird brew.

GOING HOLLYWOOD: A DINOSAUR'S DREAM - Steven Spielberg's period as a patron of animated cartoons bore some rich fruit (the Animaniacs TV series, Pinky and the Brain, the first AMERICAN TAIL) but also sired Universal's virtually forgotten animation WE'RE BACK! A DINOSAUR'S TALE, sort of a kindergarten alternative to JURASSIC PARK in which a bunch of time-traveling talking dinosaurs show up in modern NYC. Maybe its only distinguishing feature was newsman Walter Cronkite in a voice-over bit as a kindly inventor-type. When WE'RE BACK went extinct at the box office, it took with it this promised sequel in which the dinosaurs go to Tinseltown. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a similar thing (and premise) happened to a butcher-blockful of BABE sequels that Universal had mapped out for us, until the massive failure of the costly BABE 2: PIG IN THE CITY sent shock waves through the studio.

BIKER HEAVEN - The late Dennis Hopper's proposed followup to EASY RIDER is one legendary unmade sequel. The only detailed description I heard was one Hopper gave circa 1986. He enthusiastically narrated how he, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson would rise from the dead after a nuclear apocalypse. The Easy Riders would enter a redneck bar filled with mutant skinhead-swastika ROAD WARRIOR types. When the radioactive right-wingers disrespected the resurrected hippies, Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson dismember them with kung fu. Some defenders say that Hopper was only putting one over on a naive reporter when he said all this.

THE TOURIST - I am given to understand this much-read, never-made sci-fi script has a mythic reputation amidst Hollywood insiders. The MEN IN BLACK-for-adults-only premise is that Earth is a prison planet of exile for all the galaxy's worst sex offenders and alien perverts. An innocent traveler is marooned here and must get off (or perhaps, given the context, "escape" is better terminology). Yes, it sounded borderline-intriguing - until I read that it was to be designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. Okay, you know all those Giger, "biomechanical" wall posters, so beloved of art-school poseurs? Those mud-toned tableau of bald, body-pierced cenobite-looking women apparently having intercourse with exhaust tailpipes or spiney machines (or machine-like spines?). Yes, it would be two hours of that. Sorry, I'm not a believer.

The Saturday Night Live gallery of shame....

A category unto itself, as the SNL producers and cast make their bids for the big bucks and try to get as many of their lame running characters as possible onto the bigscreen. I don't care if Molly whatsername's from Cleveland; the Mary Catherine Gallagher bit has gotten verrrrry tired. At least we don't have
to worry about these not-ready-for-prime-time movies:

THE LIAR - with Jon Lovitz. 90 minutes or so of Tommy Flanagan going "Yeahhh, that's the ticket!"

THE WILD AND CRAZY GUYS - Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin reprise their swinging Czech Brothers characters ("Foxes!"). I believe this actually might have had potential back around 1980 or so, but it was being floated as a feature around the time CONEHEADS was being made. Sorry, give it a rest.

GOOD OLD DAYS - During the time when they were the only two reasons viewers kept turning on Saturday Night Live, a heavily made-up Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy had among their running characters a couple of old-timer pals, who basically tossed catchphrases around at barbershops and shoeshine-stand sets ("You crazy! You a crazy foo'!"). So this would've been a movie about that. Okayyyy.

HANS AND FRANZ GO TO HOLLYWOOD - A musical satire, with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in cameo. I think that might have actually been amusing. For about the first 20 minutes.

NOBLE ROT and MOON OVER MIAMI - Bob Woodward's book Wired, if it is to believed (Dan Aykroyd will tell you it isn't), described this pair of John Belushi projects that were excruciating to all but the severely stoned. First was a comedy about the California wine business; second was something inspired by the Abscam scandal in Congress. But apparently the plots changed and metamorphosed like the tides, as cocaine flowed in and out.

The "Dieter" movie - I propose that a fact-based drama about just the attempts to get this infamous abortive comedy off the ground might be a cool "meta" fiction, like THE ORCHID THIEF. The story goes that star Mike Myers was paid tons'a'money by Universal to adapt his weird, sexually ambiguous black-clad German cineaste Dieter for the big screen, with none other than Oscar-worthy Ron Howard directing. Now, I actually think there might be worthy material in this - the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, and the intellectual pretensions of vapid Eastern-Europhile avant-garde metropolitan art scenesters (don't think Cleveland doesn't have them). But the project brake-squeaked to a halt when Myers simply announced that the script - which sounded like nothing highbrow at all, just Dieter on a Pee Wee Big Adventure in search of his kidnapped pet monkey - wasn't working. Universal sued, and things got really TMZ.com ugly. As I recall Myers had some kind of breakdown, and even complained of threats against his family by the minions of Opie. Some executives claimed the Dieter script was a masterwork and deserved to go before the cameras - but let's face facts, these are studio suits with dollar signs permanently lodged in their greedy eyes. As far as they're concerned, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN was a masterwork. I'd side with Myers on this one. When the author of THE LOVE GURU says a script he wrote was so substandard as to be unfilmable, I'd listen.