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Post by stephen on Apr 22, 2019 20:25:03 GMT
So in light of the news that Francis Ford Coppola might finally be getting Megalopolis off the ground (though I'll believe when I see it), I figured we could use this thread as a discussion for all of the projects announced by major directors, living or dead, that for some reason or another never got made.
We can talk about the reasons that the projects fell through, who we would've liked to see in them, and whether or not the world is better off with them not being made.
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Post by stephen on Apr 22, 2019 20:34:46 GMT
We'll start with the granddaddy of them all: Kubrick's Napoleon.
We know the story: Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with Napoleon and had been laboring for years to make a film based on the emperor's life. Kubrick had cited Abel Gance's Napoleon and Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace as not being good enough films about the subject (he was wrong), and so he sought to make a definitive biopic on Bonaparte.
He'd finally been given the go-ahead to begin preproduction in the late '60s, but around this time, Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo was released . . . and promptly tanked. Studios immediately backed off of funding Kubrick's venture. Kubrick went on to make A Clockwork Orange and recycled most of his Napoleon ideas when he did Barry Lyndon, but he never seemed to give up hope that he'd eventually be able to make this film.
According to Jan Harlan, Kubrick's initial choice for casting Napoleon was David Hemmings, of Blow-Up fame. A fantastic choice, hypothetically speaking. Of course, the ballooning budget proposed for the film necessitated a bigger name, so Hemmings was replaced by Jack Nicholson. Which might've been a solid pick, as it was in an era before Jack became "Jack", but Hemmings just feels so right for the role. Kubrick evidently wouldn't budge from his choice of Josephine, though: Audrey Hepburn. I often thought that if Kubrick had survived into the 2000s, he would've tried again and cast his Eyes Wide Shut actor Tom Cruise in the role. Hell, I almost wish he'd been able to make that film instead, using Cruise and Kidman as Josephine.
Of course, the film has been revived of sorts with an upcoming HBO miniseries directed by Cary Fukunaga, but I am unsure if it will be fueled by the mad passion that obviously consumed Kubrick in his conception of this film.
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Post by therealcomicman117 on Apr 22, 2019 22:43:57 GMT
Werner Herzog's The Conquest of Mexico, which was supposed to be his return to a Fitzcarraldo / Aguirre type survival story, only this time being told from the perspective of the Aztecs, rather then the conquers themselves.
Herzog by all accounts did have a treatment done, but apparently could never find right financing, though there isn't much in the way of why the film didn't ultimately get made. I suppose Herzog just lost interest, but with him in charge, and with that kind of source material. It was ripe for the potential to be great.
Another film I would have loved to have seen, though it did end up getting made just with a different director at the chair, is Cronenberg's Total Recall. Love the Verhoeven flick, but I think Cronenberg could have done something much different maybe arguably more darker, with less of that Verhoeven's satire. Could have even brought him more into the mainstream, if things had actually gone right.
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Post by stephen on Apr 22, 2019 22:48:22 GMT
Werner Herzog's The Conquest of Mexico, which was supposed to be his return to a Fitzcarraldo / Aguirre type survival story, only this time being told from the perspective of the Aztecs, rather then the conquers themselves. Herzog by all accounts did have a treatment done, but apparently could never find right financing, though there isn't much in the way of why the film didn't ultimately get made. I suppose Herzog just lost interest, but with him in charge, and with that kind of source material. It was ripe for the potential to be great. I'm actually embarrassed right now, because I'm an avowed Herzog fan (he's in my holy trinity of directors) and I had no idea about this project. It sounds absolutely incredible. I kinda imagine it as something of a Coetzee-esque tale as well, like the yin to Waiting for the Barbarians's yang. I wonder if he might've lost interest when he saw Apocalypto.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2019 22:49:52 GMT
Dreyer's film about Jesus probably would've been a masterpiece.
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Post by Film Socialism on Apr 22, 2019 22:50:52 GMT
Dreyer's film about Jesus probably would've been a masterpiece. bresson's on exodus in a similar fashion
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Post by stephen on Apr 22, 2019 22:53:08 GMT
Dreyer's film about Jesus probably would've been a masterpiece. You gotta wonder whether or not Mel Gibson had heard of Dreyer's intent to shoot the film in the ancient dialect when he was conceiving of The Passion of the Christ. It's also interesting that Dreyer and Gibson both shared a goal to make a sweeping Viking epic as well.
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Post by therealcomicman117 on Apr 22, 2019 22:53:32 GMT
Werner Herzog's The Conquest of Mexico, which was supposed to be his return to a Fitzcarraldo / Aguirre type survival story, only this time being told from the perspective of the Aztecs, rather then the conquers themselves. Herzog by all accounts did have a treatment done, but apparently could never find right financing, though there isn't much in the way of why the film didn't ultimately get made. I suppose Herzog just lost interest, but with him in charge, and with that kind of source material. It was ripe for the potential to be great. I'm actually embarrassed right now, because I'm an avowed Herzog fan (he's in my holy trinity of directors) and I had no idea about this project. It sounds absolutely incredible. I kinda imagine it as something of a Coetzee-esque tale as well, like the yin to Waiting for the Barbarians's yang. I wonder if he might've lost interest when he saw Apocalypto. Same. It sounds like it could have been a tale of madness. I was surprised to stumble upon it, as I hadn't heard about it prior, but it peaked my interest, enough to actually research it, but I couldn't actually find much. Thankfully I did also discover this video, that details the few bits of information regarding the film that is actually out there. It sounds super ambitious and fascinating.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 22, 2019 22:58:23 GMT
Well Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope is the one that comes to mind first. Some of its plot points show up in Frenzy but Kaleidoscope was a much darker thing in conception at least and could have been a real boundary pusher. I see much in common with the aborted original Henri-Georges Clouzot L'enfer too (which was later made in a different way but great by Chabrol and has the extraordinary original footage below)
L'Enfer:
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2019 23:19:18 GMT
Would have been good.
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Post by bob-coppola on Apr 23, 2019 1:53:08 GMT
I had no idea Kubrick wanted to cast Hepburn in the Napoleon movie. That's such a weird pairing, one I'd never thought about, and it's so unfortunate it didn't happen...
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Post by Martin Stett on Apr 23, 2019 2:07:02 GMT
Remember when Ridley Scott was gonna direct a Monopoly movie? I miss the days when Ridley Scott was gonna direct a Monopoly movie.
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Post by Mattsby on Apr 23, 2019 2:17:37 GMT
This is from a January '02 Variety article. Altman couldn't raise the $20m budget, so it was dropped. With that cast, could've been special......
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Post by SeanJoyce on Apr 23, 2019 15:07:34 GMT
My "go-to" for this is Shadow Company; at the peak of his screenwriting prowess, Shane Black, with an assist from The Monster Squad co-writer Fred Dekker, penned an action/horror screenplay about a squad of genetically-enhanced "super soldiers" killed during Vietnam. Fast forward to Christmas (of course) in the late 80s, when their bodies are being transported by train for a ceremonial burial on the anniversary of their deaths. En route they awake from their slumber and descend upon a sleepy small American town to wreak havoc.
John Carpenter was slated to direct, in what would be his follow-up to They Live. Walter Hill signed on to executive produce and tinker with the screenplay. According to Carpenter, Hill wrote "great tough guy soldier dialogue".
In the end they weren't able to coagulate all of the moving parts and the whole thing was eventually abandoned. For years rumors have persisted that Black has wanted to resurrect the project, but so far nothing.
It would have been, in a word, epic.
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Post by TerryMontana on Apr 23, 2019 15:46:18 GMT
The first thing I thought of was Kaleidoscope.
And that's the only thing I thought of...
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Post by stephen on Apr 23, 2019 18:07:30 GMT
The other granddaddy of them all, the one that inspired not just an excellent documentary but also spawned several classics in the wake of its cancellation: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune.
Frank Herbert's novel is a notoriously tough nut to crack, as it is a dense and dry affair packed to the brim with politics, espionage, outlandish cultures, a shitload of inner monologues and all sorts of things that make it a daunting task to envision as a film, much less pull off. But in the early 1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky set out on what would be a Herzogian quest to do so.
Of course, Jodorowsky being Jodorowsky, this wouldn't be a straight adaptation. Oh no; in Alejandro's words, he was going to "rape" Herbert's novel and instead capture the "spirit" of it while loosely adapting the actual narrative. Jodorowsky conceived of a version that would be 14 hours long and hew much closer to a dream he'd once had. Dune purists would've been far more outraged than they were at Lynch's version, for sure, as at least Lynch attempted to be faithful to Herbert's novel.
Whether you love or hate him, you can't deny Jodorowsky had some truly outsized ideas, and he'd recruited a veritable murderer's row of artists to help him realize his vision. H.R. Giger was tasked to design the Harkonnens' homeworld/style, which had his trademark biomechanical style. Moebius and Chris Foss were to take on the rest of the art direction. Dan O'Bannon would design the special effects. Pink Floyd, coming off the back of The Dark Side of the Moon, were to provide the score (although Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield were also courted). And then you have the cast! Salvador Dali was to play the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (for a fee of $100,000 per minute of screentime). Orson Welles was to play Baron Harkonnen, and Orson's only stipulation was that his favorite chef be on set on all times. Other big names include Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Amanda Lear, Udo Kier... and as Paul Atreides, Jodo's own son.
Jodorowsky burned through most of his budget before filming a single scene, and the project was ultimately taken away from him. And so Dune passed into legend, but not before those who had already spent a lot of time designing the worlds in Jodorowsky's film went on to other things... most notably, Alien. Without Jodorowsky, we wouldn't have the greatest sci-fi film of all time.
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Post by theycallmemrfish on Apr 23, 2019 23:37:45 GMT
While he did eventually get it made, I do wish that Oliver Stone was able to make Alexander while he was in his prime (with Tom Cruise as he wanted way back when)... man, what a different world we woulda lived in. But with that said, I do enjoy The Final Cut of the film, but it's nowhere near what Stone was capable of in that late 80's/early 90's period.
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Post by Leo_The_Last on Apr 24, 2019 1:30:00 GMT
Great topic, I'm totally obsessed with this kind of stuff. Maybe I'll chime in on a later date, pretty busy at the moment.
Great examples folks! Cheers!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2019 13:08:53 GMT
I was pissed when several projects with Al Pacino was kinda doomed.
De Palma: Happy Valley (But was later done by Barry Levinson) and another one with Retribution
Barry Levinson also missed movie with him in Gotti (But was later made into disaster.)
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Post by Deleted on May 1, 2019 13:43:03 GMT
Amazon Scraps Expensive David O. Russell Drama In Light of Weinstein Scandal The untitled $160 million TV series was to have starred Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore.
Stupid sex abusers!!!
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Post by jimmalone on May 2, 2019 17:00:40 GMT
The first I always think about is Sergio Leone's plan to make a film of the WWII siege of Leningrad. This could have brought a new meaning to the word epic.
It was in 1969 after shooting Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) that he came across Harrison E Salisbury’s The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad, a non-fiction account of one of the most arduous and horrific campaigns of the Russian Front in WWII. Intrigued, he would begin a long battle to realise a human scale story around this tragic and brutal backdrop of famine, death and destruction, with atrocities on both sides.
Leone said: “From very specific elements documented in this book, I imagined a parallel story and invented other characters. Thus, in my film, the hero is not a journalist but a young cameraman who is supposed to be accompanied on his trip to Leningrad. Initially, the two men were only there for a few days, but very quickly, without really realizing what happens to them, they find themselves trapped in the besieged city by Hitler’s army. They will remain there until the end, until death. During the siege, the U.S. cameraman has a love affair with a young resident of Leningrad. At the time, Stalin punished with ten years in prison every Soviet citizen convicted of having an affair with a westerner. But the girl does not care because she has no hope of surviving the siege. In the end, the cameraman dies on the day of the liberation of the city, when he is filming the surrender of the Germans. And the girl is aware of his death by chance seeing a movie newsreel: the camera sees it explode under a shell … “.
Leone first travelled to the USSR in 1971 to gain their trust and cooperation, feeling he could not film anywhere other than Leningrad itself. However, it took the ascendance of Gorbachev in 1984, and the relaxing of restrictions, or Glasnost, to change Soviet inflexibility; Once Upon A Time In America was the first of Leone’s films to be allowed a release in the Soviet Union. Leone suggested a Russian writer, familiar with the conditions of the siege, work with him on the script, to which the authorities agreed. Leone envisioned the film beginning thus:
“I start with a close-up of the hands of Shostakovich. They are on the keys of his piano … The camera will be on a helicopter out of the house and close up will be taken through the open window. We see the hands seeking the notes of the “Leningrad Symphony”. And the composer begins. The music is repetitive. It begins with three instruments, then five, then ten, then twenty, then one hundred … And my opening will be made on this music. In one clip. A clip as it has never been done: the camera leaves the close up of the hands of the composer. It goes back. We discover his room. It comes out through the window. It is the street. Dawn. Two civilians out into the street. Everyone carries a gun. And they ride on a tram. The camera follows the tram. The music continues. The tram stops several times. Civilians take it. They are all carrying weapons. Finally, the tram arrives in a suburb. It stops in a small square where there are already several other trams. And beside them, there are waiting trucks. Trams empty. All the passengers were armed men … no women. Men climb into the trucks. The camera follows the truck. Always the music. Always the same plane. No cuts. No inserts. And we arrive at the front trenches to protect the city. Music is increasingly strong. There are trenches. And suddenly, the camera goes to the steppe. Huge. Empty. The music rises more. Until the camera has crossed the steppe to take in a row, thousands of German tanks ready to fire. And from the first shots, mixed with music, I cut! Following plan: a curtain opens. This is the concert of Shostakovich. Five thousand people in the room. Hundred eighty musicians play. And then: CREDITS!”
Shostakovich of course wrote his famous 7th Symphony during and about the siege of Leningrad. Leone’s regular composer Ennio Morricone rearranged Shostakovich’s music for the film; it was scored, but never recorded. Rober DeNiro was envisioned by Leone as playing the American photographer; a Russian actress would play the woman he falls for. Leone biographer and expert Sir Christopher Frayling said,
“What’s interesting about that is you can see in Once Upon A Time In America, human relationships are becoming more important to Leone in his films. There’s this man desperately in love with this girl, and he changes his entire life. There’s an emphasis on personal relationships which you never get in his Westerns. The heart of the Leningrad film was to be this love affair. Leone was definitely changing. He was going to be a different kind of film maker. Relationships, emotions and characters who develop because of their experiences. You don’t get that in the Westerns at all. There, they’re icons.”
By the end of 1988 Leone had finally managed to raise about 100 million dollars for this American / Soviet / Italian co-production, purely through his own “sheer personal magnetism” (Frayling). However, his health was failing, and he requested that should he be unable to continue, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud take up the mantle. In 1989, two days before Leone was to sign the contract to begin work on his long realised dream, he died of a heart attack.
Annaud said, “A few days after his death, the producer Alexandre Mnouchkine called me to tell me that Sergio wanted me to take “The 900 Days of Leningrad.” I asked him if he has a script and he says he has a suitcase of books on the subject! So I had to let go.” Annaud went on to make a film based around a love triangle between the real Russian sniper folk hero Vasily Zaytsev (Jude Law), fictional Commisar Danilov (Ralph Fiennes) and Tania (Rachel Weisz) in Enemy At The Gates, set during the siege of Stalingrad. This simplified story was received poorly in both Russia and Germany, leaving us only to wonder what Leone could have achieved had he lived.
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Post by stephen on May 2, 2019 17:04:04 GMT
Very, very good call on Leone's Leningrad. If I could resurrect a dead director to have them make one more film, it would've been Sergio to do this.
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Post by Deleted on May 2, 2019 17:07:19 GMT
Fighter (2010) might be more interesting in hands of Aronofsky.
And THE TIGER with Pitt! What a loss!
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Post by Mattsby on May 4, 2019 23:30:48 GMT
I remember two more projects never happened: The winter of Frankie Machine with De Niro (I think, directed by Scorsese, not sure though) and Dali & I with Pacino and Cillian Murphy, directed by Andrew Niccol. I was really hoping these two would happen... I remember when IMDb said this was "filming" - what a tease! This project morphed into what's now called Dali Land directed by Mary Harron, with Ben Kingsley as Dali, but it was supposed to film last November, and didn't, so possibly stalled...... there might be a slight, slight chance for Pacino to still get the part if Kingsley is busy and they ask him again. But very likely not. Personally I think - ethnicity aside, which never bothered me especially with Pacino - it's a sort of perfect role for him to stretch his oddball wacky charm and he's always wanted to play a painter. As for Gala - who is Russian so Lesley Manville isn't perfect either - I'd go Huppert who has a college degree in Russian(!) (and you could see her speak Russian recently in The Romanoffs episode). I mean, to see the two of 'em together..... !!!
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Post by TerryMontana on May 5, 2019 10:36:22 GMT
I remember two more projects never happened: The winter of Frankie Machine with De Niro (I think, directed by Scorsese, not sure though) and Dali & I with Pacino and Cillian Murphy, directed by Andrew Niccol. I was really hoping these two would happen... I remember when IMDb said this was "filming" - what a tease! This project morphed into what's now called Dali Land directed by Mary Harron, with Ben Kingsley as Dali, but it was supposed to film last November, and didn't, so possibly stalled...... there might be a slight, slight chance for Pacino to still get the part if Kingsley is busy and they ask him again. But very likely not. Personally I think - ethnicity aside, which never bothered me especially with Pacino - it's a sort of perfect role for him to stretch his oddball wacky charm and he's always wanted to play a painter. As for Gala - who is Russian so Lesley Manville isn't perfect either - I'd go Huppert who has a college degree in Russian(!) (and you could see her speak Russian recently in The Romanoffs episode). I mean, to see the two of 'em together..... !!! I remember that "filming" status!! I know about that Dali Land project but I'm not sure it's the same (or something like that). Anyway, it seems no Dali project gets off the ground that easily... And I don't see Al being involved with Dali again, tbh. Or Napoleon for that matter...
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