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As far as mediums of art go, cinema is arguably the most popular and unarguably the least cost-effective. One movie, with a 90 minute runtime, requires dozens or even hundreds of people working together and thousands or even millions of dollars to sink into the budget. As the movie industry has grown over the years, and the budgets required to make films have become more and more bloated, the prevailing thought in Hollywood has been to put out movies as a product than as artistic statements. Which has always been true to an extent, people put in money they expect money back, but the optimal case has always been to balance that desire with an artistic vision, most often the director’s vision. Hell, this ‘blockbuster’ culture that is currently threatening to collapse our entire film industry only really became a thing in the mid 70s, at the height of the auteur director period in American film history. Sure, sometimes you end up with a Waterworld scenario, but I think it’s okay to risk a Waterworld once in a while in order to get a Star Wars or a Conan the Barbarian. Then again, I’m not a billion dollar film studio executive, so what the fuck do I know?
Lately, it seems like I’ve been less interested about films and more about the making of films, and especially the films that could have been. The most prevalent example I think of at the moment is Jodorowsky’s Dune, the documetary detailing surrealist filmmaker’s extravagant and ultimately doomed attempt at adapting the classic sci-fi novel Dune to film, by all accounts a psychedelic epic which would have featured design work from a pre-Alien H.R. Giger, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali and flaming giraffes. Sure, there’s no way to tell whether that movie would have been good or not if it had seen the light of day, but I think it’s in our nature to imagine what could have been, and in so doing aggrandize it over the things we do have (looking at you Lynch). Not to mention in the cases of films that did work, like in Heart of Darkness (the making of Apocalypse Now!) and My Best Friend (detailing the working relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski across several films), seeing the extreme difficulties that filmmaking can bring, it seems a shame that all that work could go to waste. Especially when it’s obvious that the director and crew had such a passion for what that film was meant to be, as was the case for Jodorowsky and the basis for out entry this time around.
Lost Souls: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is exactly what it says on the tin. In the early 90’s auteur horror director/witchcraft enthusiast Richard Stanley, fresh off of Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), decided to pursue his lifelong dream of adapting his vision of H.G. Wells’ classic story “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to film. The film (from what Stanley reveals to us) was to be a modern interpretation of the novel: A castaway comes across an island where Doctor Moreau, vilified and ostracized from the scientific community for this theories, has become the godlike creator of a race of horrific animal people who, in a bit a symbolism, fail to live up to the dreams of the creator and ultimately destroy him and themselves. Graphically violent, amazingly grotesque make-up and design, and a director that seemed to understand the heart of the Wells’ story better than any other adaptation had managed to accomplish beforehand. The potential seemed to be there for Richard Stanley’s dream to be the definitive Moreau film, just as Spielberg had done with Jurassic Park and Kubrick with The Shining. When New Line picked up the film, and with it some A-list talent, including Bruce Willis, James Woods and the legendary Marlon Brando as the good Doctor, that grand vision seemed to be all but assured.
Of course, history has proven it wasn’t. Without completely explaining the story, I’ll say that a series of bad production issues, corporate money paranoia, John Frankenheimer, Val Kilmer, and Marlon Brando’s fat ass all combined lead to a film more at home on Mystery Science Theater 3000 than the Criterion Collection. It’s a pretty crazy story, as the making of these flop movies occasionally are, and since it’s about a horror movie that never was, I figured it was appropriate for Halloween. Watch it, and pine for what could have been. If only...if only.
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