Great Movies That Never Were

[GregMcduck]

...but should've been.

Taken from another forum I go to:

Several people here have seen Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, the 1989 animated film directed by Masami Hata (who has done a lot of animation for Sanrio, of all people). It's one of those weird, decent memories from childhood that you go back and find out wasn't very good. It's cute enough but there isn't a hell of a lot going on. The old NES game probably had a better story.

But what a lot of people don't know is that in 1984, Hayao Miyazaki did an animation test to get the directing job. He and Yoshifumi Kondo (the guy who did Whispers of the Heart and was head of animation on Grave of the Fireflies and Kiki's Delivery Service) whipped up a test trailer in 70mm widescreen, and fuck me, it looked like this:

Watch that and tell me if it looks like it was made in 1980-fucking-4 (besides the announcer, who is the most 1980s kids movie trailer announcer ever). That would've been the most incredible shit ever. Of course, like I said, Miyazaki didn't get the job and instead turned his efforts toward his next movie, which would be Castle in the Sky. But wouldn't that have seriously been great?

[GregMcduck]

Alright, I got another one. There's a Russian animation director named Yuriy Norshteyn. Anyone who's studied foreign animation probably knows him best as the Hedgehog in the Fog guy. So in 1981 he gets it into his head to direct an adaption of Russia's favorite short story, The Overcoat. The story looks like a promising film is done right, and I enjoy Norshteyn's animation style, but for various reasons, it's more then 25 years later and he's not even half way done with it. He's 67 now, and if he keeps at this pace he'll have 40 minutes done by the time he dies of fucking old age.

Here's some shitty video:

[Dim of the Yard]

How about The Thief and the Cobbler?  The film was supposed to be Richard Williams's masterpiece.  It was in production from 1964-1995.  He signed a deal with Warner Bros. to have them finance and release it, but it was pulled when Williams could not finish on time.  Completion Bond Company took over the movie and finished with, without Williams at the helm.  The version the United States got was entitled Arabian Knight, and was far from the version Williams intended, weighed down with a bunch of unnecessary songs and giving many, many lines to the titular characters, who were originally intended to be silent (save for one line the Thief has at the end of the film).  It also has the unfortunate label of "Aladdin rip-off" from many a critic.  Some folks are attempts to restore the film to what it was originally intended, or as close as possible, considering much of the original artwork is lost.

Here's a trailer for the "Re-Cobbled" version of the movie:

And I think you can find the entire Re-Cobbled version of the movie on Google Video.

[GregMcduck]

I've had a VHS copy of that film for years, had no idea about the backstory. Learn something awesome every day. 

[RoninFox]

That Nemo trailer is amazing.  I think I vaguely remember seeing that once, but never actually saw the movie.

Is there anything in this world that makes Miyazaki happier than animating his characters flying?

[ImOscardotcom]

Little Nemo had tons of hugely talented people working on it at one time or another-George Lucas, Chuck Jones, Ray Bradbury, Moebius, Frank Thomas (Supervising Animator at Disney from the 30s to the 70s and one of the famed Nine Old Men) and of course Miyazaki.

Wasn't the first 30 minutes of The Overcoat supposed to have been released by the end of last year?

And I think there are two bigger reasons Williams got taken off the film than his inability to complete it (from what I've heard, he only had 10-15 minutes left to go when they fired him)...
*Warner Bros. was nervous about the 'arty' tone of the film.
*There was another Arabian-themed animated film coming out later that year (1992) that apparently lifted plot elements, characters, shots etc. wholesale from The Thief and that Warner knew it couldn't compete with.

The whole story is terribly, terribly sad.

[GregMcduck]

On the "Japanese men I wish I could be as good as" tip, another great movie that never was is Akira Kurosawa's version of Tora Tora Tora.

A joint project between a Japanese film crew and veteran American director Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), the early days of Tora! Tora! Tora! had Akira Kurosawa assigned as the lead Japanese director, poised to make his American debut with a mammoth script weighing in at well over four hundred pages: and that just for the Japanese side of the story. Accustomed to complete autonomy in his projects, Kurosawa bowed out after several weeks following a series of run-ins with Fox executives over not only the unwieldiness of his vision, but also disagreements concerning the shade of white used in the interiors of the Japanese carrier ward rooms! Unfortunately, Kurosawa's initial involvement with the picture resulted in his regular cohort Toshiro Mifune turning down the role of Admiral Yamamoto (a role that he would play in Jack Smight's 1976 Midway and 1968's Yamamoto biopic Rengo kantai shirei chôkan: Yamamoto Isoroku), as the two titans of Japanese cinema had lingering bad feelings over their last collaboration, the underseen Akahige.

What a fucking film that would've been. It's okay for Kurosawa, though, because by 1975 he was back on his feet making Dersu Uzala, and by 1980 Mifune was starring in the Shogun TV series while Kurosawa was making one of the best movies he (or anyone) would make, Kagemusha.

[ImOscardotcom]

I wasn't going to post anything about Alejandro (El Topo) Jodorowsky's attempted big-budget adaption of Frank Herbert's Dune because, well, I've never seen a Jodorowsky film or read Dune. But then I thought, eh, what the hell...

Cast
Brontis Jodorowsky as Paul
Orson Welles as the Baron
Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha
Alain Delon as Duncan Idaho
Geraldine Chaplin as Lady Jessica
Salvador Dali as the Emperor

Special effects by Dan O'Bannon

Music by Pink Floyd

Characters and creatures designed by Moebius

Spaceships and hardware designed by Chris Foss

Harkonnen Castle designed by H.R. Giger

Pre-production drawings. Sorry about the size.

Spoiler

Pre-release poster by Moebius.


Duke Leto Atreides by Moebius.


The Emperor's artificial planet by Chris Foss.


The Baron by Moebius.


Lady Jessica by Moebius.


Spice Container by Chris Foss.


Harkonnen by H.R. Giger.


The Emperor by Moebius.

Oh, and Gloria Swanson and Herve Villechaize were supposed to be involved somehow. Don't ask me where.

[ImOscardotcom]

Well, to wrap this thread up (since no one else seems to be interested in it) I thought I'd post some videos (well, some videos and an article).

A fuller version of the 1984 Little Nemo test film, apperently cropped from its original 2:20.1 aspect ratio.
[gv=475,325]3342755205038857742[/gv]

A 1982 documentery on Richard Williams by Thames Television that discusses-among other things-The Thief and the Cobbler-or The Thief Who Never Gave Up, as it was then called.
[gv=475,325]854447661854231874[/gv]

An article by Alejandro Jodorowsky on his attempted adaptation of Dune. It's a little odd.
http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky.asp

[GregMcduck]

Hey, I'm interested in this stuff. If we have to keep this thread alive between you and me, so be it.

[GregMcduck]

And, of course, who can forget the shitload of Terry Gilliam films that never got made. Good Omens and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are probably the ones I'd kill the most people to see.

[GregMcduck]

Oh, I'm on a role, here's another one I just found.

Chris Farley had expressed interest in starring as Arbuckle in a biography film. This idea was suggested to him by comedy guru Del Close. Farley died before any details of the film had been worked out.

Although Farley almost certainly never had the chops of other SNL alums who went on to blow people away in dramatic roles, he certainly had a dark and tragic side to him that no one ever tapped into. It's possible that the film could have been horrible and a gigantic flop, but it's also possible that he would have turned a corner, started a whole new phase in his career, and become transcendent from the fat guy in a little coat. Not likely, I realize, but hey.

[ImOscardotcom]

What about Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon? From Wikipedia....

After the success of 2001, Stanley Kubrick planned a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. He did much research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay. With assistants, he meticulously created a card-catalogue of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the story in the historical places where Napoleon's life occurred.

In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film would turn out, but that he expected to create 'the best movie ever made.' Ultimately, the project was cancelled for three reasons: (i) the prohibitive costliness of location filming; (ii) the release, in the West, of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and (iii) the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). Stanley Kubrick's screenplay for this film has been published on the Internet. Much of his historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), set in the late eighteenth century, just before Napoleon's wars.

Here's a 2000 Salon article on its history:
http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2000/10/04/napoleon/index.html

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Phantasm IV.

I know, there's Phantasm OblIVion. What you don't know is that there was an alternate script in the works that might have brought about a more satisfactory conclusion. It was going to involve a yellow-blood plague and Bruce Campbell, but the plug got pulled at the last minute.

[daltysmilth]

Well, let's get this thread rolling again:

An obvious addition to this thread is Frank Darabont's Indiana Jones IV script.  It contains many elements that were used in the final film, including crystal skulls, Marion being the love interest again, Indy being friends with someone whose connections to the Soviet Union end up with Indy being watched by the Feds, and the character of Oxley.  (Although Darabont's script leads you to believe that Oxley is dead for the first half of the film, while Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull is a bit more ambiguous.)  And the A-Bomb-proof fridge has its origin in this script.

What's different is that there's a lot more character development, with the script going out of its way to show how the characters have matured since the last time we saw them.  Indy is no longer afraid of snakes, and Marion is happily married.  (With no children.)  There's a few tongue-in-cheek moments, including sort of a parody of the scene of Indy grabbing the Idol from Raiders, and a fourth wall bending reference to Willie Scott.  (Marion asks what happened to her, and Indy tells her that she went off to Hollywood to become an actress and ended up marrying some famous director.)  Is it perfect?  No.  A lot of the dialogue seems awkward and stilted, and there are a few moments where Indy acts really out of character, such as when he gets drunk following being given a "leave of absence" from Barnett College because of his accidental ties to the soviets.  And the scene with Henry Sr. seems a little forced.  But these are problems that could have been fixed in subsequent drafts and during shooting.