Tales From Development Hell (14 page)

The resulting thirteen-page treatment was greeted with enthusiasm by Rona and Berdincker, the executives overseeing the project for Dimension. “We went down to the Tribeca Grill and just cut up the outline. They’re two great executives,” Cirulnick adds, “and their notes were specific. They gave me strong direction, helped me make the cuts that needed to be made, and I got commenced.” Cirulnick’s first draft, dated 20 April 2000, follows the treatment in most respects — although Quaid’s discovery of a Martian colony living deep beneath the surface was omitted. Cirulnick’s ninety-six-page ‘revised first draft’, dated 8 May 2000, opens with a spectacular action sequence, as Hauser and fellow ‘ReKall Unit’ agents York Brogan (described to put the reader in mind of Ving Rhames), Chris Park (“think Jet Li”) and Quaid’s paramour Maggie Thomas (a Parker Posey type) foil the hijacking by terrorists of a Saturn-bound cruise ship, which culminates with the terrorists’ turbinium bomb being diverted into the sun. As the successful mission ends, Hauser/Quaid wakes to find himself at ReKall, where doctors Bob, Edgemar and Jaslove explain that he suffered a schizoid embolism during
his original ReKall trip, and has been effectively comatose for ten years. Here Cirulnick borrows a few elements from the earlier Goldman-Shusett draft: the explanations for Quaid’s assimilation of real-world developments into his dream (the news was on) and his lack of muscle atrophy (“newest thing, Doug — magneti-pulse muscle stimulation”), Lori’s break-up and affair with her personal trainer (although Cirulnick plays the brush-off as a taped vid-phone ‘Dear John’), and Quaid’s subsequent employment on the construction of a space elevator, which, this time, is described as a ‘space bridge’ and is tethered to Mars, which trillionaire industrialist Hugo Strickrodt is preparing to open to the public.

Commencing work at the construction site, Quaid is surprised to meet York Brogan, now calling himself ‘Jones Seni’ and denying all knowledge of his association with Quaid or Hauser. Quaid is more cautious approaching ‘Sue Richards’ (shades of
Fantastic Four),
a nerdish neighbour who resembles Maggie. When Quaid’s flashbacks cause an accident on the space bridge (itself a flashback to the Goldman-Shusett draft), Quaid injures his arm, peeling away a piece of false skin to reveal scars he suffered in his hijack-foiling fantasy. Now convinced that starting the reactor which gave Mars its atmosphere and foiling the Saturn cruise ship hijack are real memories, not implanted ones, Quaid is pursued by ReKall’s Colonel Ladson — Hauser’s commanding officer in his hijacking memories — who is anxious that Quaid may be about to achieve ‘total recall’ and discover the truth: that he, York Brogan, Chris Park and Maggie are part of a secret cadre of NorthBloc Intelligence operatives so elite even
they
do not know who they are or what they do — or have done — for the government.

Employing ReKall technology, each operative has dual identities, both stored on digital disk: one disk contains their birth and upbringing through each of their missions logged and catalogued in detail — this is their real, or ‘Alpha’ life. The second disk contains their lives up to a point — their real childhood is used, but at some key juncture a new ‘program’ has been written, with a normal, run-of-the-mill ‘Beta’ life, the identity these elite agents possess when off-mission. Thus, the agents are only restored to their true selves (for Quaid, the Hauser persona) when they are on-mission; as soon as their missions are completed, they resume their Beta lives with no knowledge or memory of their agency activities. “That way,” Brogan tells him, “should we want to betray the agency, or should anyone get their hands on us, we’ll be useless.”

Quaid learns all this from a digital recording of York Brogan (echoes of
the cement factory scene from
Total Recall),
who urges him to break Chris Park out of the Pasternak Institute for the Criminally Insane, where he has been held since his memory implant failed to take. (Quaid is also shown footage of his own mission history, among which Cirulnick slyly includes images from such Schwarzenegger films as
Predator, True Lies, The Terminator
and
Commando.)
Meanwhile, things on Earth are hotting up — literally: the turbinium bomb appears to have swollen the sun until it swallows up Mercury and threatens to burn all life on Earth to a cinder. Global warming accelerates on a catastrophic scale, as giant holes appear in the sky, through which deadly heat rays scorch the Earth (a cinematic cataclysm subsequently explored in
The Core).

Meanwhile, Quaid helps Chris to escape, the pair head to Mars (disguised as a fat Samoan and his Japanese wife), where Brogan and Maggie appear to be in Strickrodt’s employ, the latter also (much to Quaid’s chagrin) in his bed. Maggie explains that she and Brogan are on a ReKall mission to infiltrate Strickrodt’s inner circle. Through her, they learn that the hijacking was a set-up, and that Strickrodt used them to send the turbinium bomb into the sun, hoping that the devastation of life on Earth would lead its inhabitants to flock to Mars. Quaid and his team counter with a plan of their own: using explosive charges planted in its turbinium core, they intend to blow up Mars, hoping that the resulting “gravity gap” causes the Earth to shift into the vacuum previously occupied by Mars, thus saving the planet from the expanding sun.

Before they can implement their plan, however, Dr Jaslove shows up
(à la
Dr Edgemar’s second act appearance in
Total Recall)
and tells him he’s still at ReKall Incorporated, where he has been in a coma ever since the accident on the space bridge — the point at which he ‘discovered’ that his secret agent fantasies were true. His fellow agents, his mission to Mars and Earth’s impending destruction by an expanding sun are all products of his imagination! Dr Jaslove shows him vid-phone images of Earth, his own comatose body and Lori at his bedside, and tells him that if he does not snap out of his delusion, he will suffer a fatal embolism. Quaid refuses to believe, vowing to continue his mission, but as his ‘fantasy’ continues, Ladson floors him with a further revelation: that even his ‘true’ identity, Hauser, was merely the invention of a military supercomputer (provoking the potentially classic Schwarzenegger line, “Then if I’m not me, or Hauser... who the hell am I?”). Refusing to believe any of this, Quaid secures the planting of the turbinium charges and blows up Mars, the fragments of which circle Earth in a ring similar to that of Saturn while Earth assumes the position of the
destroyed planet.

No sooner has the explosion occurred, however, than Quaid wakes up at ReKall, where the news announcer is commenting on Mars’ destruction, which has shifted Earth’s orbit and saved it from the swelling sun. “Scientists say the Mars explosion was an unexplained phenomenon, and may be the result of the sun’s growth, which pressurized Mars’ turbinium core,” the anchorwoman announces. “Earth’s a little worse for wear, but she’ll live — and hopefully like her makeover!” Quaid — either denied the credit for saving the planet, or recovered from his schizoid embolism, depending on which version of events he and the audience chooses to believe — is reunited with Maggie/Sue at the space bridge, where they kiss in front of the awe-inspiring view of Earth, complete with its ring of Martian debris — an exact reprise of the Melina/Quaid clinch at the end of
Total Recall.

“I turned in the script,” says Cirulnick. “They dug it, Jesse Berdinka dug it, my agents dug it. Everything was cool. I was all fired up. I kept calling and calling, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’” Eventually, Cirulnick heard that Schwarzenegger had read the draft, and that a meeting had been arranged between Bob Weinstein, Andrew Rona and the star. “My understanding is that meeting took place,” the writer says. “I never found out specifically what happened — all I know is after that I got a call from Miramax who asked me would I be interested in rewriting the script to shrink the budget down. Maybe they wanted to cut money out of the below-the-line stuff to give more money to Schwarzenegger. It began to look like they couldn’t make a deal with Schwarzenegger, and it may have had something to do with Miramax not thinking that his stock was high enough for the fee he was asking. After that,” says Cirulnick, “Andrew Rona told me that they were beginning to talk about other people — Vin Diesel’s name was mentioned — but it never happened. I think at the time Vin Diesel was paid $20 million to do
xXx,
so I guess he wasn’t going to be that much cheaper than Schwarzenegger.”

Although Cirulnick half-expected to be asked to rewrite it for another actor, his agents advised against it: “They said, ‘Look, if it’s not going to go with Schwarzenegger, don’t write any more on the project. You want to have written the script for Schwarzenegger, not some other guy. It’s a dynamite sample, but don’t get too wedded to it.’” For most of 2001 and 2002, Dimension’s partner company, Miramax, suffered a series of flops and financial disasters, including the expensive collapse of
Talk
magazine, ballooning costs on Martin Scorsese’s
Gangs of New York
and MGM’s abrupt exit from its co-production deal on
Chicago
— from which it did not recover
until
Chicago
turned a profit in 2003. So when a comprehensive
Variety
profile failed to mention
Total Recall 2
among the future projects either of Miramax or Dimension, Cirulnick surmised that the project was dead. “I think the monetary issue, the economics of the script and the film, and not being able to make a deal with Schwarzenegger cost the film momentum, and that was it,” he says. “I left a man down on the battlefield and there was nothing more that could be done.”

Dimension refused to let it die, however, offering Shusett and Goldman a chance to write another draft: “They called us and said, ‘Here’s Matt’s ideas — let’s blend them with your action set pieces, which we love,’ because, as we do in the first one, we had a lot of unusual special effects ideas, some humorous, some bizarre. They said, ‘Can you fit these into Matt’s plot?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’” Shusett and Goldman wrote what they describe as “a beat sheet, just five or six pages,” showing how a new version, combining Cirulnick’s story with their set pieces, might look. “Andrew Rona said, ‘This is wonderful — it’s a combination of what Matt had come up with and how you guys see it having to be re-channelled to fit your action sequences. I’ll give this to Arnold right now.’ And Bob said, ‘I’m completely convinced that you guys can deliver on the script. If [Arnold] buys the concept, we’ll make the movie.’” Yet again, Schwarzenegger shot down the script.

In the meantime, former Carolco partners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar reunited to form C2 Productions, one of their first moves being to purchase the rights to Schwarzenegger’s most successful franchise, the
Terminator
series. While James Cameron, director of
The Terminator
and
Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
passed on the chance to make
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,
Schwarzenegger agreed to reprise his most famous role, with
Breakdown
writer-director Jonathan Mostow at the helm. Around the same time, Vajna and Kassar entered negotiations with Dimension to re-acquire the sequel rights to
Total Recall.
Although that deal reportedly fell apart in early 2003, the $75 million US opening of
Terminator 3
put Arnie back on the box office map, leading Shusett and Goldman to approach Bob Weinstein with yet another concept, presented as a five-page treatment.

“We have a lot of funny new ideas, including six or seven very unique and funny and bizarre set pieces which we wrote in our ’98 draft which we’re transplanting into this,” Goldman said in 2004. “The plot will be very complex again, and very much fantasy versus reality. We hope to shock the audience — something that most films would be afraid to do — by having the audience think something completely different as to how they interpreted
the first movie. You see that in the first half hour. And that’ll be the first shock. And from then it’ll go on twisting back and forth towards ‘fantasy versus reality’, but with a new storyline involving a new leading lady.” And possibly a new leading man. “The way we’ve sent it to him is flexible,” Shusett notes, “so if Arnold’s not available, or he doesn’t want to do it, or ends up being Governor of California, it can be done with another actor.”

Although Goldman and Shusett’s plans for
Total Recall 2
came to nought, interest in the property remained relatively constant, not least because of associations with the ‘recall’ of California Governor Gray Davis, prompting a snap election in which he was replaced by Schwarzenegger himself. Although this, naturally, led to some humorous Internet memes revolving around the
Total Recall
concept, Schwarzenegger’s governorship put his acting career on hiatus for the next eight years. By the time he was back, plans were well underway not for a sequel to
Total Recall,
but a remake, based on a new screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
(Ultraviolet, Salt),
Mark Bomback (Die
Hard 4.0,
aka
Live Free or Die Hard)
and James Vanderbilt
(Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man).
With a cast led by Colin Farrell — who, in an example of synchronicity worthy of Philip K. Dick himself, had co-starred in Spielberg’s
Minority Report
— the film was scheduled for release in 2012, more than two decades after the release of the original.

Fans clamouring for a sequel would have to make do with Dynamite Entertainment’s four-issue comic book miniseries, scripted by Vince Moore, the storyline of which was a direct continuation of the 1990 film. “Nowadays I think it’s hard to have strong feelings about movies, given how many older movies are being remade,” Moore told Comic Book Resources on the eve of the first issue’s publication. “I loved the original movie. It in turn led to my reading of the source short story and enjoying that as a very different experience. I’m sure the new movie will be its own experience as well. I am curious to see what the new version of
Total Recall
will look like,” he added, “and I hope it does well. But it will be its own thing and may not have anything in common with the ’90s film other than the title.” Not to worry, though. “After all,” runs the final line of the Philip K. Dick short story that all of the various adaptations share, “the real one probably would not be long in coming.”