Tales From Development Hell (38 page)

Only when they had the assignment did Massett and Zinman actually sit down to play the games, which Massett summarised as “a lot of puzzle solving; a bad guy tries to stop her, or beat her to the prize.” The film, they felt, should be equally simple: “It was a franchise. It was cool. It was a chick as an action star.” As Zinman explained, “The challenge is to create a story that’s not going to alienate the fan base. But by the same token we wanted to expand the audience to people who weren’t familiar with the game. Something we did incorporate was Lara’s intelligence,” he added. “Her success as an action hero is that she isn’t just brawn. She figures things out; she’s the smartest one in the room. I think that’s the challenge of the game, that’s why people get addicted to it.”

Seventeen days after getting the job, Massett and Zinman turned in their first draft, at which point, according to Zinman, they were “hailed as heroes.” Not so, says de Souza. “Massett and Zinman’s first attempt was not well received,” he counters, adding that it followed his draft in general, keeping the Alexander the Great idea but changing the ‘MacGuffin’ — Hitchcock’s term for the motivating factor of most stories — from Archimedes’ Mirror to Achilles’ Shield, an artefact Massett and Zinman learned about in a PBS special on the Macedonian conqueror. “Of course, the whole point of the MacGuffin isn’t what it is, but how it is used and where it takes you,” says de Souza. “So my original idea — that Alexander the Great stumbled on something very dangerous and hid it to protect civilization, hiding the only clue under the sea — led to a series of scenes and adventures that hardly changed in draft after draft.”

Massett and Zinman were subsequently replaced by
Face/Off
scribes Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, who worked with Herek developing a new draft, subsequently reviewed by one ‘Darwin Mayflower’ on the website Screenwriters Utopia. “The script opens in Macedonia, 632 BC. Alexander the Great is mad with power: he has an ancient, supernatural breastplate, the Shield of Achilles, that makes him invulnerable. Alexander has begun to kill his own people, to feed the demon-dog Cerberus, and two of his men, Priam and Sophius, decide enough is enough and plot to take him down. They eventually do, with the help of one of Alexander’s consorts, and break the breastplate into three pieces and bury them at the furthest reaches of the earth.”

Cut to the present day, in which Lara Croft is re-imagined as a Robin Hood-style figure who returns stolen artefacts to their rightful owners — the Shield of Achilles being the subject of her latest quest. “Her frail Uncle Charles Powell hooks her up with the bookish Dr Alexis Toulin, who works for the Greek Ministry of Antiquities. Alexander’s tomb has been found and Alexis fears that the three sections of breastplate, one of which Lara unknowingly found, might end up in the wrong hands (anyone who possesses it is invulnerable, remember).” Lara sets off for Morocco with Dr Toulin, gatecrashing a party taking place above a cave containing the second piece of the breastplate. Ultimately, Mayflower added, “Dr Toulin winds up being a criminal. Her Uncle is in on it, too (he’s dying and wants the breastplate so he can go on living). Lara gets together with the good-guy-she-thought-to-be-bad, [Theo] Rooker. And together ... they track down the Shield of Achilles and try to stop Alexis and his dangerous wife.”

Mayflower went on to describe Werb and Colleary’s take on Lara herself as “a wonderful contradiction. She’s beautiful but alone; she can speak six languages and knows her mythology like an average person knows his days of the week ... she’s ready to take on any challenge, but won’t accept a man in her life. Lara’s parents died in a plane crash,” he added. “Their bodies were never discovered and their empty mausoleum is like a self-torturing device to remind Lara her life with her parents never had a conclusion. Her butler dramatically tells her she helps find things for people because she’s really looking for her parents.” Unfortunately, he added, “Lara’s problems aren’t dealt with, and she just becomes another piece in the plot-puzzle. The lost-parents rap is also a little stupid: sure, it sucks to never find your parents’ bodies, but she has accepted they are dead, and grieving over finding the mangled corpses of your loved ones isn’t the best activity for a buxom heroine. Lara later runs into — wow! totally by accident! — those dead parents. And it’s once again not a stroke of paint in Lara’s personality, but another plot point.

“You’re not asking much with a
Tomb Raider
movie,” Mayflower added. “You want to sit down and see [Lara] kill bad guys, just make it under a gate as it’s closing, and spout some cool one-liners. That the authors couldn’t give us at least that much is both disappointing and baffling.” Although impressed by an early scene which places Lara in an ancient-ruins-themed casino — and another in which Lara is tortured by being tied to a post while centipedes crawl up her body, only to crush one of them with her ample cleavage — Mayflower’s overall disappointment was clear. “There’s just not much going on,” he lamented. “And when it does, it’s Lara in some hackneyed
action scene we’ve watched twenty years ago and were just as bored then as we are now.”

According to de Souza, this draft spent a huge amount of time, “like twenty-eight pages!” in ancient times with Alexander and company, “sort of like
The Mummy
did before Brendan Fraser even showed up. This drove the studio
crazy,
because they were negotiating to pay Angelina Jolie a record price to be in a ninety-minute movie, and now at the eleventh hour Herek wanted to take away a third of her time on screen, and replace it with millions of dollars of actors, sets and costumes that were all — essentially — a prologue!” Nevertheless,
The Mummy
had, against most predictions, proven to be a huge international success for a rival studio, Universal, and it was perhaps unsurprising that Paramount were willing to take the
Tomb Raider
film in a new direction. In the meantime, however, Herek dropped out to direct Mark Wahlberg in
Rock Star,
leaving
Tomb Raider
with a ‘hard’ release date — a target date which a studio has marked out for a particular film’s release, and which it us unwilling to shift — but no director. “It was the worst situation,” de Souza states. “The movie was due out the following summer, so it had to start in September or October of that year. That’s so far into the process, you can’t even shop for directors — even if you say, ‘Who’s available?’ and start interviewing people, that takes six weeks.”

It was at this point that someone at the studio remembered that British director Simon West, who had made the smash hit
Con Air
and, for Paramount,
The General’s Daughter,
was stuck in Development Hell on another Paramount project. West owed the studio a movie, so he would be available relatively cheaply, given that the price for that unnamed film had already been fixed. Thus, says de Souza, “Paramount threw Simon West off a postponed film also on the lot and rolled his deal over to
Tomb Raider
— a move which, at the time, seemed both wise and efficient.” West, however, did not like the direction the
Tomb Raider
script was taking. “The old drafts had a lot of ‘Mary Poppins’ representations of England,” he told
Premiere.
“It was fairly horrendous. I said, ‘Look, I want to change everything but the title and the character.’ I had to come up with it very quickly.”

“As soon as he was locked into it,” says de Souza, ”he took off his nice guy mask and completely hi-jacked the movie. He says all the right things to get the job, and once he’s in he says, ‘It’s a piece of shit. I could write the script myself.’” Whether West was aggrieved that he had been manoeuvred into directing a potential blockbuster under the terms of an existing deal — meaning that he would not get the kind of payday he expected from a film like
Tomb Raider
— or whether he genuinely did not like the script, was unclear. In any case, says de Souza, “he demanded he be given an additional paycheck to write his own script, in lieu of the one already in ‘prep’ — mine.”

West, who had spent more than a year developing a film based on 1960s TV series
The Prisoner,
made no secret of his initial scepticism at the prospect of taking on
Tomb Raider.
“Every time it came up I thought that we must really be desperate if we’re looking to video games for film ideas,” he commented. “I was a real prejudiced snob about it. No film based on a video game has ever worked.” Neither did reading earlier drafts endear the project to him. “[One of them] had scenes with people visiting the Queen and drinking tea,” West told
Dreamwatch
magazine. “It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

Describing his own vision of
Tomb Raider: The Movie
as “James Bond on acid” and “James Bond as it should be — slightly sadistic, supercool, with a surreal element,” he said he had read all of the previous drafts, and decided that Massett and Zinman’s was the one he liked best. As a result, West holed up in a London hotel room and bashed out yet another script, which — according to a synopsis posted on Coming Attractions — combined elements of several earlier drafts. “The plot, briefly, involves adventuress/magazine editor Lara Croft’s pursuit of the death mask of Alexander the Great,” the report stated. “The mask was split into three pieces when Alex’s hidden tomb was sealed to protect it from raiders (the closing of the tomb opens the film). The pieces of the mask were spread around the world. Lara unwittingly has one piece of the mask in a relic she takes in her introductory action sequence. The piece comes to her attention when a Greek man named Darius offers to buy the piece and, when she refuses to sell, he steals it. Lara then has to figure out what the piece is and find the other pieces before Darius.

“Darius wants to find the tomb because Alexander is said to have possessed the Shield of Achilles, which makes its holder invulnerable. Lara makes good use of her family butler, Jeeves, and a reluctant archaeologist friend she once had an affair with, Justin, to hunt down the mask pieces. The movie is full of action sequences with Lara finding her way through the tombs with Darius’ men in pursuit... The final showdown is a bit hokey, as a plunge off a cliff ends with Lara saving herself with the shield. The plot is really an excuse for the action scenes, which range from the Middle East to the Khyber Pass to some nifty underwater work. The biggest problem with the movie is that Lara herself does not act particularly sexy and there is no real heat between her and Justin or even her and Darius. It’s very PG in that respect. Fans may like to know that the script does show Lara grieving for her dead,
rich parents and has her work as editor of an adventure magazine where she publishes accounts of her exploits. All in all,” the report concluded, “this project needs some more work to make it stand out. Otherwise, it’ll turn out to be just another action flick.”

Few were surprised when the release date slipped again, this time to the summer of 2001. Perhaps nervous that the studio may tire of their inability to shepherd the film into production, Gordon and Levin called in a series of ‘closers’ —
Mission: Impossible 2
scribe Brannon Braga, future
Avatar
co-screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, and Academy Award nominee Paul Attanasio
(Quiz Show)
— who continued to massage the script. According to de Souza, Mike Werb and Michael Colleary worked briefly with West, an experience they reportedly described as “horrible”. Says de Souza, “Mike Werb said, ‘The movie’s called
Tomb Raider,
and there’s no tombs and there’s no raiding,’ and Simon West said, ‘That’s my plan — I don’t want to be obvious.’ Other writers had told me that they would sit in a room with Simon West where they would say, ‘You can’t do that, it ruins the surprise,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want any surprises in this movie — that’s twentieth century. This is a twenty-first century movie. We’re not here to surprise or play games with the audience or shock them or talk about characters and motivation — this is just pure kinetic energy and momentum.’”

Basically, de Souza adds, “West went back to the scripts that were abandoned, and did a cut and paste and put them all together, and did his own rewriting across the top of it. He invented the storyline about the antediluvian Conan-esque Hyborean Age prehistory ‘triangle of light’ that was made from a meteor, and (with Angelina) added all the father/daughter scenes. Nobody wanted him to do that, but nobody could stop him. The studio was happy [with the script], but he kept saying, ‘I want another rewrite.’ He was driving them crazy.” Lloyd Levin sees it differently. “From a creative point of view, Simon totally turned it around.”

West worked with Massett and Zinman on yet another draft, delivered in March 2000, keeping the theme of immortality from the ‘Shield of Achilles’ drafts, but replacing it with West’s idea: a search for an artefact called ‘The Triangle of Light’ by the ‘Illuminati’ — a secret order described in the
Illuminatus
trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson (for whom a newly-introduced character, Wilson, is presumably named). Said Zinman, “When we met with Simon his idea was the sacred shape, and there’s only one sacred shape and that’s the triangle. The trinity, the number three, the pyramids, the Masons, Christianity, the ‘all-seeing eye’ — it’s just naturally there... We wrote in prose
form what the mythology was, who the ‘people of the light’ were, what the pieces [of the triangle] were. I’ve got to tip my hat to Simon West,” he added. “He said, ‘Let’s take it out of the known. Let’s make it more mystical and unknown.’ I think it was a wise choice.”

Despite all these revisions, de Souza says that the script’s basic shape and flavour remained close to his original: “We were still chasing after something Alexander had hidden, and Lara had a love/hate trust/don’t trust relationship with a guy she was travelling with in partnership.” West renamed all the supporting characters, including two held over from the de Souza draft — the cybernetic trainer, JEEVES, and the male lead, Kincaid — which he changed to ‘SIMON’ and ‘West’ respectively. “I thought it revealing that he put the name ‘Simon’ on the robot, which is a mindless drone, and ‘West’ on the character who vacillates,” says de Souza wryly, “because the film demonstrated completely mechanical storytelling, combined with a lot of indecision about which way to go.”