Tales From Development Hell (4 page)

Despite the fact that the Douglas-Brodie partnership had secured a two-year option from Andy Vajna, they had apparently been shown only the original Batchler draft, and were unaware of any other. Thus, they hired another A-list writer, who spent six months and a great deal of money rewriting the Batchlers’ script — with disastrous consequences.

“Michael and Catherine obviously wanted to do
Smoke & Mirrors
— it was a great movie for them to do together — but they were at their wits’ end, because they had spent all this money, and the script was, by all accounts, unreadable,” says Henning. “I never saw it — I don’t even know who the writer was — but they were, like, ‘This is horrible.’” As a last resort, the producers called Brett Fain, who asked if they had read Henning’s draft — the one he felt was filmable. “They read it and called me and said, ‘This is exactly what we’re looking for.’” Henning agreed to meet with them to discuss yet another rewrite. “There are very few people in Hollywood I respect,” he says, “but with Michael, from
Fatal Attraction
to
Wall Street
and
Falling Down,
his movies have had social impact; social resonance. So when I went over to their house in Century City, it was pretty trippy — you know, having ‘Gordon Gekko’ open the door in his slippers, and Catherine heavily pregnant.” The trio spent several hours discussing story and character, following which Henning embarked on another rewrite.

This draft, 110 pages in length and dated August 2000, was described by online script reviewer Stax as “leaner, less campy and [with] better dialogue than either his 1997 rewrite or the Batchlers’ script ... retaining the basic
structure and scenes from the Batchlers’ version while improving the content of those scenes, how they’re played out, and the overall behaviour of the characters.” While Stax also felt that this draft had “less panache” than the 1997 version, “the 2000 draft is less giddy and the last act’s no longer a tirade of pithy one-liners and sight gags.” Stax also liked the development of the Houdin/Colette/Darcy love triangle.
“Smoke & Mirrors
is now driven forward by a trio of heroes rather than just by Houdin; Darcy and Colette are no longer mere sidekicks,” he observed. Darcy, in particular, had been developed beyond what he saw as the “swashbuckler cliché” of earlier drafts, although he was still demonstrably more of a man of action than Houdin’s more cerebral protagonist. Houdin, meanwhile, had become “less verbose and theatrical, more withdrawn and cold now, rather than snooty.” Stax also felt that a good balance had been struck between making Colette a woman of her time and retaining an independent streak that’s familiar to modern audiences. “She’s just plucky and passionate enough without seeming out of step with 1856 Algeria.” Stax further noted that the “cartoonish” portrayal of the Arabs had been toned down, and even the principal villain, Zoras, had been improved. “While he’s still a secondary (and even sketchy) character, Zoras [is] less of a hokey super-villain now. His dialogue was less theatrical and his presence more enigmatic.”

“Supposedly everyone liked it,” Henning says of this draft, “and before long the film was in pre-production, with location scouts and set designers working around the clock. That’s when things got sort of bogged down.” Indeed, it was several months before
Smoke & Mirrors
secured an A-list director, during which time Douglas and Zeta-Jones co-starred in their first film together — Steven Soderbergh’s
Traffic
(though they shared no scenes) — were married, and celebrated the birth of their first child. Then, in February 2001, it was announced that the director of
Smoke & Mirrors
would be John McTiernan (Die
Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair),
whose planned sequel to
Basic Instinct
had just fallen apart. On 22 May 2001, industry bible
Variety
reported that the film might start shooting as early as the autumn: “The fact-based story ... has been a high-profile affair since 1993, but reported interest from the likes of Mel Gibson and Sean Connery turned out to be its own version of smoke and mirrors. Douglas’ brother Joel and Zeta-Jones’ brother David are producing with Kevin Brodie, and if the film’s producer, Initial Entertainment Group, can pull together the financing for the ambitious film and lock down the A-list principals, the movie will be no illusion.”

According to Henning, McTiernan’s involvement sparked a new wave
of difficulties for the production. “He instantly set the world on fire,” the screenwriter explains. “He started making all these demands, like he wanted to have Leslie Dixon, his pet writer, work on it. She’d written
Pay It Forward,
which didn’t make her seem like the best person to rewrite
Smoke & Mirrors.
Besides, they’d already gone through an eight- or ten-year multi-million dollar rewrite cycle and they were happy with the script. They didn’t want to start yet another development cycle on it where the new writer would want to change everything.”

Nevertheless, eager for the project to move forward, Douglas and Zeta-Jones invited Dixon to stay with them at their holiday home in northern Majorca, to which the writer allegedly responded by saying she would not be able to meet them for two weeks — a move which Douglas and Zeta-Jones took as a snub. Shortly afterwards, in June 2001, McTiernan left the project, citing what
Variety
described as “insurmountable business differences.” As the Batchlers put it: “John McTiernan never was that involved with the project. The trades often announce things before they are nailed down. Almost immediately after McTiernan’s involvement was announced, his deal fell apart for business reasons and was never finalized, so he quickly departed from the project before doing any work on it.”

By this time, the Batchlers had been brought back into the mix, after a delay of almost a decade. “It was sort of like we were on a train track,” says Janet, “and we had kept moving forward on our own train, and
Smoke and Mirrors
had gone off on a little siding. We would get reports and say, ‘Oh no, I hope they don’t ruin it!’ But it seemed to be in this endless grind of being rewritten and nothing happening. It didn’t bother us too much because while it was always our first love, being our first big sale, we were busy with other projects and creatively our minds were wrapped up in other worlds and other stories.” The Batchlers had several meetings with Joel Douglas, who agreed that their original scripts would form the basis of the film — or at least the latest set of rewrites. “They were also scouring our other two drafts for nuggets that might be of use. Our interactions with Joel were all very amiable and supporting of our original vision. However, Michael had already decided that a playwright friend of his from England — his ‘pocket writer’, as it were — should do a dialogue polish for him and Catherine.” Nevertheless, a purchase price was agreed: $7.5 million dollars. “Of course, we didn’t see any of that,” Janet explains, “that money all going to the companies that owned the script at the time. But it jump-started the project again, and the next thing we knew we were being invited to sit down and talk with the producers.”

Adding to the problems plaguing the production was a rival project,
The Magician’s Wife,
adapted by
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
scribe Melissa Mathison from a novel by the late Brian Moore, based on the same historical events as
Smoke & Mirrors.
According to a report in Screen International, the $25 million film was set to star Academy Award winners Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet, under the direction of François Girard (The
Red Violin).
The similarities were no mere illusion: set, like
Smoke & Mirrors,
in 1856, Moore’s novel concerns Henri, formerly France’s greatest magician, now content to spend his days tinkering with mechanical devices (much to the annoyance of his long-suffering wife Emmeline) until a French colonel convinces Henri to put on a magic show in French-occupied Algeria, in order to convince the natives that a
marabout
(living saint) with alleged magical powers is no more powerful a magician than Henri himself, and thus avert a holy war.

Girard’s film, however, did not materialize, and barely a few weeks passed before
The Peacemaker
and
Deep Impact
director Mimi Leder — whose most recent film,
Pay It Forward,
had been scripted by Leslie Dixon — was announced as director of
Smoke & Mirrors.
At this point, the budget was pegged at under $100 million, but when Leder returned from a location scouting expedition to Morocco (at the production’s expense, of course), she submitted a budget proposal a full fifty million dollars higher. After all, Leder reasoned, the script featured three star-driven roles, took place in Paris and Algiers in 1856, included an Indiana Jones-style set piece in the desert palace of Sulieman the Great, and several other expensive scenes, including an ocean voyage. There was even a musical set-piece. “We wrote in a song for Colette, who’s supposed to be a cabaret singer,” Henning explains. “There’s a scene where Houdin is with Colette and all the sheiks, and they start bidding black camels for her. And she’s like, ‘Three black camels, are you kidding?’ So she gets up and does this dance number where she kind of shows the sheiks — and also Houdin — what she’s worth.”

“Mimi Leder would have been absolutely fantastic,” says Janet Batchler. “We would have been very excited to have her direct the project. They were in pre-production, location scouting in Morocco, and set to start shooting in January 2002. And then 9/11 happened.” We were told very authoritatively that Michael Douglas and some other people connected to the production were not going to go to some Islamic country in the wake of 9/11 to shoot a movie. And I suppose the money people got a little nervous about it. They were just a few months away from production and the planned shoot in Morocco fell apart.” In a bid to rescue the project, some Arizona locations
were scouted, “but the project couldn’t be put back together in time for its planned early 2002 start date.”

Douglas and Zeta Jones remained attached to the project through a period in which rights holder Initial Entertainment Group was bought by InterMedia Film, which company virtually shut down when the German government closed the tax shelter upon which it was heavily reliant. Although it was reported in 2001 that
Conan the Barbarian
and
Apocalypse Now
screenwriter John Milius had been tapped to write yet another new
Smoke and Mirrors
screenplay, little further was heard from the project. In 2006 came not one but
two
period films with magic as their subject matter: Christopher Nolan’s
The Prestige
(with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) and Neil Burger’s
The Illusionist
(with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti). Although generally well received in critical circles, their mixed fortunes at the box office failed to spark a revival of interest in magic in general, nor
Smoke &/and Mirrors
in particular.

Almost two decades after their million-dollar script sale, the Batchlers would be back in the news for the sale of a big-budget action-adventure with a basis in historical fact: Paul W.S. Anderson’s
Pompeii.
“It’s a small intimate story (ha!) in which a mountain explodes, eighteen thousand people die horribly, and a young slave fights insurmountable odds to win his freedom and the woman he loves, having chosen a very bad day for it,” the Batchlers say of their $95 million movie, due for release in 2013. Meanwhile, they refuse to give up on the prospect of seeing
Smoke and Mirrors
on the big screen. “For one thing, in half the meetings we take, someone still comments on what a great script it is, how much they loved it, and how they wish it would get made. For another thing, the fact that the movie hasn’t been made means that no one has ruined a frame of it yet. We still expect this movie to be made someday — and then we will get to ‘look back’ on the experience. At this point,” the Batchlers conclude, “we are still looking forward as well.”

“I think it will find its way,” says Andrew G. Vajna, “because if a project is strong enough and had the right story to tell, and a fascinating period in which it tells it, I think that sooner or later it will come to light.”

___________

1
In early drafts, his motivation for his change of heart is unclear: he is resolutely apolitical, and seems unmoved by the idea of oppressed Arabs rising up against their French conquerors; yet his sudden change of mind is typical of his mercurial, idiosyncratic personality.

2
In fact, the
hashashim
were mentioned in the Batchlers’ very first draft, as Darcy describes them to Colette: “An order of fanatics devoted to the art of political murder. That’s where our word ‘assassin’ comes from.”

3
While this may be true of their subsequent drafts, the Batchlers’ first draft has Robert-Houdin and Colette on the boat by page 11.

4
For the record, the Batchler drafts climaxed in precisely the same way.

“I thought it was gonna be fantastic, like
Star Wars
or
Lord of the Rings.
The movie they actually made was a bad
Twilight Zone
episode.”

— producer Don Murphy

I
n 1962, the publication of Pierre Boulle’s novel
La Planète des Singes
(‘The Planet of the Apes’) caused something of a sensation in his native France. Not just because the novel — in which three astronauts crash-land on a planet populated by intelligent apes — was an inspired and dramatically different science fiction fable with a seam of socio-political satire running throughout, but because, at the time, Boulle was considered one of France’s most gifted ‘serious’ writers. His previous novels such as
Face of a Hero, A Noble Profession
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai —
the film adaptation of which had won him an Oscar in 1958 — were all rooted firmly in the real world. Boulle’s single, extraordinary idea — that of an “upside-down” world where apes were a highly evolved species, and men little more than their pets — was triggered by a visit to the zoo, where the apes’ mimicry of human mannerisms set him thinking about the relationships between the two species. It was his sole contribution to the field of science fiction; indeed, Boulle protested that the book hardly belonged to the genre at all.