Here's a letter I got in regards to the Wesley Crusher playing Morpheus in a SANDMAN movie. The author of the letter probably knows about these things since he's Neil Gaiman and well if you need me to explain who he is, well it'd just be sad. The coolest bit is that he is possibly caught up in the whole Modesty Blaise deal, seems he'd write a sequel if the first one took off. Well let's keep our fingers crossed. Thank Neil for giving us all a breath of air. Scary bit there.
I've been flooded with e-mail over the last few days asking about the Wil Wheaton thing you ran. It seems quicker to write to you than to keep writing back to them.
I'm afraid there's no truth in it. This is what I wrote to one correspondent:
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This is just silliness. (And is the first I've heard of it.)
For a start I wasn't involved in the Sandman screenplay: it was by Elliott and Rossio (Zorro, Aladdin etc) and Roger Avary did some rewrites on it -- he was hired as director; he was fired about a year ago after showing some Warners people Jan Svenkmajor's "Alice" as an example of how he wanted the sequences in the Dreaming to feel, and after a discussion with the producing entities (Jon Peters et al) which he was told that this should be a summer action blockbuster and they wanted a fistfight between the Sandman and the Corinthian.
Warners own Sandman outright; always have done. DC Comics owned all rights back in the days when I signed the original contract with them. Obviously Roger couldn't have taken the rights away to shop around. Nor could I.
I don't recall Roger as having a favourite actor for Sandman, although he mentioned a number of people, including Daniel Day Lewis, David Thewlis and Rufus Sewell as people he'd be interested in. All English actors.
Anyway, that was well over a year ago now. Rumour has it that Warners have recently got another script in from someone else. No-one's sent it to me. Obviously, I hope they make a good movie. Or that they don't make a movie at all.
Where the Sandman movie is concerned, I'd rather not get involved. (No-one should be made to barbecue their own baby, as I've said for many years.)
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The Natasha Henstridge for Modesty Blaise thing isn't true either, by the way -- it was made up by the NEWS OF THE WORLD in the UK and repeated in Screen International. (The first Modesty movie script -- A TASTE FOR DEATH -- is currently being written. I'm meant to be writing the second one, I, LUCIFER, if we ever get that far.)
