Tales From Development Hell (37 page)

Arriving in Curaçao, Lara finds Erikson dead, and narrowly avoids meeting the same fate. Although Erikson’s map has been stolen, she digitally enhances the one on his videotape, and follows it to Ecuador, where she purchases the services of Dodge, a rugged American guide as trustworthy as his name suggests, and sets off up the Napo river in pursuit of the murderous Larsen and his fellow Aussies. After an eventful boat ride, during which the pair fend
off deadly alligators and narrowly escape being sucked into a whirlpool, Lara ends up one step ahead of Larsen and his malevolent boss, Malvern, both of whom have failed to realise that magnetic north has shifted four degrees since 1523, when the map was made, and that a lake featured on the map was drained by a volcanic earthquake in 1814. Entering through a volcanic fissure, Lara and Dodge discover Incan stone formations dating from the early 16th century, and make their way through a series of increasingly elaborate and ingenious traps. Finally breaching the tomb of Manco, an Incan king, Lara discovers that El Dorado does not mean ‘Golden City,’ but ‘Golden Man’ — a reference to Manco himself, who discovered the secret of alchemy, turning base metals into gold. She offers Dodge the same fifty-fifty split Erikson offered her, if he will accompany her on the next stage of her journey: a trip even further into darkest Peru to search for Manco’s alchemical device, a magical bowl known as ‘The Black Veil’.

Of course, there are further revelations to come. No sooner have Lara and Dodge found the magical device than Malvern and Larsen turn up to claim their prize, revealing Dodge to be a traitor in their employ. Dodge regrets his betrayal, however, having grown fond of Lara during their shared exploits, and engineers her escape, getting himself shot in the process. With echoes of her struggle to save her father, Lara refuses to leave Dodge behind, dragging him to safety and sneaking aboard Malvern’s ship, where a last revelation awaits her: that Malvern is using the Black Veil not to turn non-precious metals into gold, but into an altogether more lucrative, dangerous and distinctly twentieth century treasure: weapons grade plutonium! Several daring escapes and one nuclear explosion later, Lara returns home, where she swaps her trademark outfit — shorts, a form-fitting Lycra top, boots and mirror shades — for a long evening dress, to attend a society cocktail party thrown by her paternal aunt. After giving her bemused aunt the Black Veil for safe keeping, Lara makes her final escape — to a pub, where she fulfills an earlier promise to share a pint with ‘The Gadget Boys’ — further endearing herself to them by downing hers in one.

Friedman delivered his 108-page first draft on 17 July 1998. By 1 October, the popular website Ain’t It Cool had posted a withering script review, courtesy of ‘Agent 4125.’ “I’m sorry to report that the content is every bit as old and dusty as the ancient artefacts that Lara pursues in her gaming adventures,” the reviewer claimed, taking issue with Friedman’s deviation from previously known
Tomb Raider
lore, such as the way Lara Croft’s parents are killed. “On its own, this would only be a small matter, but there are plenty of other deviations and a general disregard for the
Tomb Raider
mythos throughout the script.” Agent 4125 dismissed the Lara/Karak relationship as “an awkward contrivance” and “a lame take-off of the whole David Carradine/Grasshopper schtick from
Kung-Fu,”
and likened Karak’s surprise attack on Lara at Croft Mansion to Kato ambushing Inspector Clouseau in the
Pink Panther
films.

By the time the story gets to South America, Agent 4125 went on, “it seems like a mix of
Predator
-style chase set-pieces in the jungle, and an obligatory series of tricks and traps as Lara navigates her way through a subterranean temple.” (But not, one assumes, in a good way.) The reviewer acknowledged, grudgingly, the fact that Friedman’s greatest challenge arguably lay in the fact that, with the exception of the gender of its hero,
Tomb Raider
was a thinly-disguised knock-off of the Indiana Jones movies, “but Friedman doesn’t even seem to be trying — [Lara] even has a colourful peasant guide to follow her around and be amazed by her ingenuity in defeating the various traps (just like Satipo at the start of
Raiders of the Lost Ark).”
Although Agent 4125 conceded that Lara’s level of flirtatious banter with Dodge was “about the one part of her character that they got right,” the rest of her characterisation was “wrong, wrong, wrong... she relies way too much on contrived James Bond-style high-tech gadgets than her own ingenuity and her motivation is... well, a mystery. It’s never really explained why she does these things that she does, or who it is she’s trying to help. She just kinda... does them.” Summing up, the reviewer described the script as “shoddy... a cross between Allan Quatermain (remember that?) and
Anaconda,
with lots of steamy jungle, perilous situations and a whole ton of characters you really couldn’t care less about.”

Clearly, Agent 4125 did not appreciate the obstacles in Friedman’s path, nor the structural gymnastics and character revisionism that might be necessary to convert a one- (or, at best two-) dimensional computer game character into a three-dimensional live-action movie icon. One obvious challenge was that, in the games, Lara’s is a largely solitary pursuit (much like gaming itself), making it difficult to create effective scenarios for dialogue, a movie mainstay. Friedman solves the problem by making Lara
re
active rather than
pro
-active in verbal situations, preferring to let actions speak louder than words. And action
is
the operative word, as Lara tackles tricks and traps, each highly evocative of her console-based adventures, with an equally typical combination of problem-solving skills and gymnastic expertise.

Scenes most typical of Lara’s games heritage include a two-gun shoot-out with subterranean rats, a scuba diving sequence complete with harpoon gun
and modified oxygen tank, and a sliding wall trap which snags her trademark pony-tail; these, along with quips like “Next time don’t send boys to do a girl’s work,” and Lara’s flirtatious dialogue with Dodge, seemed to prove that Friedman had done his homework, capturing the elusive spirit of Lara Croft in word and deed. Nevertheless, on 11 December 1998, a little over two months after Ain’t It Cool published Agent 4125’s negative review, the same site reported that Friedman had left the project, with another pseudonymous scooper (‘ArchChancellor Ridcully’) implying a causal link between one fan’s assessment of a first draft script and Friedman’s subsequent departure. Not so, says Friedman.

“I’d love to give you the whole story, but I’ll spare myself the agony,” he told
Premiere
magazine. The writer went on to explain that, twenty minutes after Paramount approved his script, he received a call from producer Lawrence Gordon, who asked him to “forget what Paramount says” and come up with more economically viable ideas. The studio, meanwhile, insisted that he continue working on the original concept. “The last thing you want to do is get caught in these tug-of-wars,” Friedman added, “because you’re a writer, a nobody — just a casualty of war.” Friedman did, however, try to reach a compromise with a second take on the film, but a week after Paramount approved the new draft, Eidos — which retained approval over script, director and star — rejected the script, for unspecified reasons. “My sense is, of all the people I met with, only one of the core group of producers and executives had played the game,” Friedman explained. “But everybody has a different interpretation of what will make a lot of money.”

In the meantime, Paramount had hired a female screenwriter, former
X-Files
and
Star Trek: The Next Generation
scriptwriter Sara B. Charno (now Sara B. Cooper), to work on an alternative take. When she struck out, the studio knew that if the next writer did not hit a home run, it was game over. Thus, they went straight to the A-list, hiring Steven de Souza, who had worked with Gordon on such blockbusters as
Die Hard
and
The Running Man,
and had previously tackled another computer games conversion,
Street Fighter.
“I was hired in September 1998 to do a story, treatment, draft, rewrite and polish,” says de Souza. “All that took six months, and I turned in my revised, polished script the first week of March 1999. The reaction to the script was universally positive, and it was the document that Stephen Herek read and which he signed on to film.” In other words, he adds, “My script was the one that broke the dam of all the Development Hell.”

By this time, de Souza says that rising star Angelina Jolie, who had co-starred
in
Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector
and
Girl, Interrupted,
was everyone’s first choice for Lara. No mention was made of Jolie, however, in a
Variety
story, dated 11 April 1999, which reported that Stephen Herek, director of
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
and
Mr. Holland’s Opus,
was close to a deal to direct the
Tomb Raider
movie, with summer 2000 the target release date. “Several scribes took a shot at adapting the vidgame,” the report stated, “[but] it wasn’t until Steven de Souza submitted his draft that Paramount deemed the project ready for a director to come on board, according to Paramount Motion Picture Group president John Goldwyn.”

‘Necros,’ a script reviewer for the website Coming Attractions, shared Goldwyn’s enthusiasm. “Thankfully,” the review began, “de Souza’s
Tomb Raider
does not begin with a silly and unnecessary backstory on Lara Croft. After a short ‘hook’ to set up the bad guys, we plunge right into a near-perfect cinematic realization of the best parts of the original
TR
computer game as Lara makes her way through the cavernous tomb of King Philip and retrieves the King’s funeral mask. When she returns home, she learns that her life may be in danger, and during the subsequent exhibition at the British Museum, a foreign minister from Kafiristan (the small third world country that Lara took the mask from) explains to Lara the mask’s significance — that it may lead the way to the long-lost library of Alexander the Great. Lara’s old nemesis, Larson (the arrogant Texan featured in the original game), steals the mask from the museum that night, and it is now up to Lara to find the lost library before Larson can. She gathers a small expedition team and sets out to find it, running into many difficult obstacles — some expected and some quite unexpected — along the way.

“Overall, this is an excellent script,” the review concluded. “De Souza does a nice job of characterising Lara, and while the plot has touches of both the Indiana Jones and James Bond films, it never feels like a rip-off of either series. Nor does the script suffer from an overdose of humour (although Lara has some great one-liners). It’s a good, solid action-adventure story with a refreshing emphasis on adventure. With steady-handed direction and some good stunt choreography, TR could turn out to be one of summer 2000’s real gems.”

Despite the anonymous Coming Attraction critic’s approval — Necros could, after all, have been de Souza in disguise — producer Lloyd Levin remained unconvinced that de Souza’s draft was ready for a green light. “We hadn’t gotten to the place where we were embracing what was special about the game, which was the character and how contemporary she was,” he told
Premiere
magazine. “We kept falling back on stories and types of movies that were familiar.” This was, perhaps, understandable, given that
Tomb Raider
itself had been a deliberate attempt to remake Indiana Jones in the image of a sexy young woman, and that all versions of the game had borrowed freely from adventure movies from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
to
Romancing the Stone.
In other words, the producers were trying to make a movie based on a video game inspired by movies. How to make that seem original?

Herek, of course, had his own opinions of what a
Tomb Raider
movie should look like. By this time, however, Steven de Souza had technically fulfilled his contract, giving Herek licence to bring in a new screenwriter, who would be cheaper and more accessible than the producer’s choice. “Another motivation may have been — and of course I’m guessing here — Herek secretly wanted a writer less firmly in the producer’s camp than me,” de Souza explains. “My having done half a dozen pictures with Larry Gordon made Herek start to think that perhaps he should have a writer on board who would report to him, and not Gordon.” It didn’t help matters that, during this period, Gordon’s comic book adaptation
Mystery Men
belly-flopped at the box office, weakening Gordon’s standing with Paramount. De Souza says that Gordon wanted to re-hire him, “possibly because I would be
his
guy in the shifting sand of studio politics post-Mystery
Men,”
but that his hands were tied. In any case, de Souza was no longer available, being buried in pre-production on his own film,
Possessed,
which he was also directing.

Whatever the reason, Gordon and Levin gave the next draft to two screenwriters at the opposite end of the spectrum: Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who had adapted the pioneering wireframe arcade game
Battle Zone
into a screenplay for Lloyd Levin. At the pitch for
Battle Zone,
Massett and Zinman recall being drawn to a life-size cutout of Lara Croft behind Lloyd Levin’s desk, and — even though they were unfamiliar with the game — decided to pitch for
Tomb Raider: The Movie.
As Zinman told
Creative Screenwriting,
“[The producers] said, ‘The situation is this: we’re running out of rope; we’re looking to make a deal with someone who can give us some security.’ They were very up front in saying, ‘No one is going to roll the dice on you at this point.’ Massett and Zinman chose not to take ‘no’ for an answer, writing a forty-page ‘scriptment’ — roughly half way between a treatment and a script — while their agent set up a pitch meeting with the producers. “Scene for scene, beat for beat, we told [them] the movie... from the opening to the final sequence,” Massett said of the meeting. “We were riffing off each other the whole time. It was tight, like a forty-minute Jimi Hendrix show.”
According to Massett, neither producer spoke during the pitch, or after it; yet before the writers had left the studio lot, their agent called to say they had the go-ahead to turn their pitch into a script.