Holy Crap!! Rodriguez Just Can't Stop!! First SIN CITY, And Now... PRINCESS OF MARS!!!
Published at: March 2, 2004, 7:30 a.m. CST by staff
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here
with some Rumblings From The Lab...
This has been one of those holy grail/what
if/maybe someday when technology catches up sort of
projects for as long as people have been trying to
make fantasy films, and it feels like the time is
finally right.
First of all, am I allowed to say how happy I am
that Robert is not writing this film? I enjoy the
movies he's been making lately... ONCE UPON A TIME IN
MEXICO, the SPY KIDS films... but they're all minor
pleasures, simple goofs that fade as soon as you step
out of the theater. And I think he's a better
filmmaker than that. Like Kevin Smith, he's a
talented guy who is plagued by one fatal flaw. In
Smith's case, it's the fact that he has about as much
visual acumen behind the camera as Ray Charles would.
In Robert's case, it's the fact that he sometimes
shoots faster than he thinks.
This time out, he's working from a script by Mark
Protosevich, and despite my on-the-record hatred for
THE CELL, I think this guy's got the goods. His I AM
LEGEND script is one of the most highly-regarded
unfilmed scripts in recent Hollywood memory for a good
reason. It's epic and personal at the same time, and
it does a hell of a job of turning a familiar piece of
material into something fresh.
And what I'm hearing about this script is that he
did the impossible and really brought the Edgar Rice
Burroughs original up to modern standards,
dramatically. Burroughs was a great pulp writer, but
A PRINCESS OF MARS was the first novel he ever
published, and even though it's obviously powered by a
huge imagination, it's not his best book. It's always
been one of those properties that was ripe with
potential, and filmmakers have tried desperately to
crack the thing and bring it to the screen.
The trades are running the story today about
Robert signing his deal to direct this film as soon as
he's finished with SIN CITY, but so far, as best as I
can tell, they've only got some of the story. For
example, VARIETY lists Alphaville partners Jim Jacks
and Sean Daniels as co-producers along with Robert and
his wife Elizabeth, who should be welcoming their new
son into the world sometime today, so congratulations
are in order on many fronts for the Rodriguez family
today. As I understand it, there's another producing
partner on the film that should be announced soon that is apparently in top secret negotiations,
someone who has been close to this project for a while
now. Hopefully, I'll be able to pin down some of
these rumors in the days ahead.
I assume a lot of you don't know the John Carter
books, since they're not exactly easy to find these
days. All told, I found about eight out of the eleven
books online to purchase, and some of those were only
available used. If you want to get a handle on what
the John Carter books are all about, you could start here,
a fansite that gives a nice overview of what it is
that draws people to the material. If you go poking
around the Internet, though, you'll find all sorts of
great material about the tortured development history
that this project has suffered through en route to the
bigscreen.
For example, Bob Clampett and John Coleman
Burroughs attempted to make it 5 years before Disney
produced SNOW WHITE. Had they succeeded, it would
have been the first feature-length animated film, and
it would have been radically different than the type
of films Disney ended up producing. Who knows what
the animation industry would look like now if they had
succeeded. They actually made it to animation tests
that Clampett animated, while John and his wife
painted the cels, and these can be seen on the BEANY
AND CECIL DVD. If you want to read more about this
potential version of the film, you can do
so right here.
Ray Harryhausen also took a crack at it, but he
was frustrated by the scale of the story. He never
managed to find a way to break it down to a feasible
size, and had to give up on it eventually.
Walt Disney considered the property while he was
alive, but it wasn't until much later that the Walt
Disney Company spent millions of dollars in
development costs trying to get PRINCESS OF MARS made.
John McTiernan was attached to it for a while, and
Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott wrote a script that
attracted a lot of fans over the years, like Tom
Hanks. Both Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts were rumored
to be involved at various points. It was an
incredibly expensive proposition, though, and
McTiernan never managed to convince Disney to pull the
trigger. I'm hoping these guys detail their
development process on their excellent Wordplayer website
sometime in the future.
The idea of Rodriguez making a film that will cost
well north of $100 million is intriguing since we know
he gets a lot of bang for the buck. In his hands, it
should look like three times that much money. And
with Texas soundstages standing in for Barsoom, I'm
curious about the film's look. I know that Rodriguez
is a raving Frank Frazetta fan, and just recently had
a chance to visit Frazetta at his museum, where they
specifically discussed Conan and John Carter, two of
the subjects Frazetta brought to such vivid life in
his work. One can only hope that he'll follow the
lead of Peter Jackson, whose choice to involve Alan
Lee and John Howe in LORD OF THE RINGS helped define
that trilogy's visual style early on. If Rodriguez
was able to convince Frank Miller that he can
reproduce SIN CITY's look onscreen, one can only
imagine what would happen if he signed Frazetta to
help steer the John Carter film's palette. After all, Robert did get Frazetta to do this poster for FROM DUSK TIL DAWN.
Personally, I can't wait to see 14 foot tall
creatures with 4 arms, tusks, antennae and eyes on the
side of their heads. I can't wait to visit Barsoom. I can't wait to see John Carter fighting with the dexterity and leaping ability of Spider-Man, but with a sword.
I can't wait to see this wild Martian landscape
brought to vivid life. This is one of those projects
that has been a long time coming, and with all of
these people in charge, I finally have faith that it
might just get done right.