Tales From Development Hell (40 page)

Despite problems which stretched from development to post-production and a widespread critical drubbing, the film — now entitled
Lara Croft Tomb Raider
— opened on 15 June 2001 with a colossal $47.7 million opening weekend, and went on to gross over $130 million in the US alone, and a total of $275 million worldwide. By the time the first weekend’s box office tallies were in, a sequel was already in the works, but although Angelina Jolie was asked to fulfill her contract for a sequel — with a $5 million pay increase — director Simon West was not invited back. “I guess at some point somebody said, ‘We’re not going to go through that shit again,’” suggests de Souza. “‘The director this time is not going to be someone who thinks he’s a writer.’”

Instead, producers Gordon and Levin hired cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont, whose directing career had derailed after early successes like
Speed
and
Twister,
with
Speed 2: Cruise Control
and
The Haunting
both proving to be box office disappointments. James V. Hart
(Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hook)
and hot newcomer Dean Georgaris
(Paycheck, Mission: Impossible III)
were among those hired to work on the script, which concerned a desperate search for Pandora’s Box, the mythical source of all the pain in the world. “The first one did not have a strong story, I’ll be the first to admit it,” producer Lloyd Levin later told
Entertainment Weekly.
“We should have made a better movie. But we learned from our mistakes and this new one is a better movie. For starters, it’s got a plot.”

Like West, de Souza did not expect to have anything to do with the
Tomb Raider
sequel, until he happened to see publicity stills featuring Angelina Jolie in the underwater temple of Alexander the Great. After doing some digging of his own, de Souza discovered that Lara was being partnered with a British agent — just as she had been in his drafts for the first
Tomb Raider
film. “That’s when I called the Writers Guild and said, ‘Listen, this may sound wacky, but when the
Tomb Raider II
script comes in for credit determination, could you check it against my “officially discarded” March 1999 script of
Tomb Raider I?’”
Sure enough, he says, “the Guild reader said, ‘Hold on a second — the source of this script is obviously the de Souza script, resurrected.’ At that point, the studio said, ‘That’s impossible! This script was a cold start, a totally brilliant fresh new approach of sheer geniusity that just happens to have been written by our producer.’” This was a shock, de Souza says, “because I’ve known Lloyd Levin for a dozen years, and he’s never written anything except a memo.”
³

De Souza can only guess what happened. “After the movie opened, on the following Monday, they probably said, ‘We want to have a sequel out in two years,’ which is impossible. Then somebody went to the filing cabinet, found the script I wrote, which had been in pre-production with sets designed, and said, ‘No it’s not — we’ve got a schedule, boards, budgets, breakdowns and production design for the de Souza draft!’ So they resurrected my script, which gave them a head start. It shows how crazy it can get.” Nevertheless, he adds, “It actually showed some kind of efficiency for a change, that somebody had the sense to remember they already had a script they liked from before... returning to the script (and budget, board, location work, prop purchases, etc) all still lying around from only ten months earlier. So they already had the comp’d Scuba gear and underwater sleds, the design for Alexander the Great’s library set, Hogan’s alley, etc.” What was more surprising for de Souza was that he had to find out by accident. “You’d think Larry Gordon would have called me to tell me this,” he says. “I’d worked with him many times. But no — I had to find it out from the Internet.”

Although Levin and Hart have privately stated that de Souza had nothing to do with the script for the sequel (technically true), the WGA agreed to award de Souza a shared story credit with Hart, with Dean Georgaris receiving sole screenplay credit. “The sequel, with every line of dialogue changed, does essentially follow my script for about twenty minutes,” says de Souza. “Then when the MI6 men come to her house, she wasn’t a bitch on wheels for no discernable reason, but she was thrown by the presence of the younger government guy. [In my draft,] he was the male lead of the picture, and his moment where he betrayed Lara and Queen and Country was
in the movie,
mind-fucking the audience, instead of in the movie’s back-story. Also, they didn’t know what Alexander had hidden, but they knew the other heavies were killing their way towards it.” Says de Souza, “The Guild said...
Tomb Raider II’s
genesis from my 1999 script was ‘irrefutable’ — the
actual word used in the Guild paperwork — at which point the studio was bound by the sixty-five year-old contract that says, ‘Guild determines credit, period.’ And that’s how I worked on
Tomb Raider
for six months, but got a screen credit for no months on
Tomb Raider II!”

Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life
finally opened on 24 July 2003 with a disappointing first-weekend take of $21.8 million — less than half that of the original — and an overall worldwide gross of $156 million. Critics were slightly kinder than they had been the first time around, but it was obvious that the paying public weren’t impressed. Paramount was swift to try and place the blame for the film’s failure elsewhere. “The only thing that we can attribute it to is that gamers were not happy with the latest version of the videogame,” ventured the studio’s Wayne Lewellen, referring to the critically derided PlayStation 2 game
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness,
which had failed to repeat the success of earlier incarnations.
Entertainment Weekly
had a different opinion: “If Paramount had spent a few bucks on polling, it might have discovered that despite its $131 million gross, nobody who went to the first
Tomb Raider
walked out saying, ‘Can’t wait for part two!’”

The Tomb Raider property suffered mixed fortunes in the wake of the twin debacles of the
Angel of Darkness
console game and
Cradle of Life
movie. In 2006, Crystal Dynamics superseded Core Design as overseers of the game’s future development, inviting one of the original creators, Toby Gard, to work on a
Tomb Raider
reboot, which would take Lara Croft back to her tomb-raiding roots. The resulting game,
Tomb Raider: Legend,
was a bestselling title on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, and a remake of the original game —
Tomb Raider: Anniversary —
was developed and released in 2007, followed by
Tomb Raider: Underworld
a year later, all proving moderately successful. On 18 August 2010, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix released a download-only title,
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light,
the first game not to feature the words ‘Tomb Raider’ in the title. That nomenclature was being held back for a ground-breaking reboot of the franchise, scheduled for late 2012.

Similar plans were being drawn up to revive the film franchise, with British producer Graham King’s GK Films, the company behind
Rango, The Town
and Angelina Jolie topliner
The Tourist,
acquiring the motion picture rights, and announcing Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — who wrote Jon Favreau’s smash hit
Iron Man
and the less successful
Cowboys & Aliens —
as screenwriters. “Mark and Hawk’s sensibilities of action and emotion are perfect for the direction we are taking this franchise,” King said in a press statement in early 2011, the 15th anniversary of the first
Tomb Raider
game. Ignoring the previous films, the new
Tomb Raider
story would be a fashionable ‘reboot’, returning to Lara Croft’s roots and re-telling her backstory for a new era. As the screenwriters commented, “We aim to write an origin story for Lara Croft that solidifies her place alongside Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor in the pantheon of great female action heroes.” Whether the new
Tomb Raider
can repeat the success of the
Aliens
and
Terminator
franchises remains to be seen.

_____________

1
Now commonly known as the PlayStation One.

2
Fans may have been even more doubtful if they knew that Jolie wanted Lara to have a Mohawk hairstyle instead of Lara’s plaited pony-tail.

3
Even if Levin did contribute to the screenplay, as he claims, the WGA makes it even more difficult for producers to achieve writing credits than directors, for obvious reasons.

“Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for
Fantastic Voyage —
it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over and I hated it.”

— Roland Emmerich on James Cameron’s version of
Fantastic Voyage

I
n 1965, an episode of the popular television series
I Dream of Jeannie
had an intriguing plot, in which Major Nelson (Larry Hagman) acts as a technical consultant for a movie in which an American astronaut is miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a Russian cosmonaut, in an effort to retrieve information from his brain.

Less than a year later, on 24 August 1966, a movie with a startlingly similar premise appeared in US cinemas. “This film will take you where no one has ever been before,” declared a title card that preceded the film.
¹
“No eye witness has ever seen what you are about to see. But in this world of ours, where going to the moon will soon be upon us, where the most incredible things are happening all around us, some day — perhaps tomorrow — the fantastic events you are about to see can and will take place.” Entitled
Fantastic Voyage,
the film starred Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch as members of an experimental expedition injected into the body of an American scientist, Jan Benes, in a miniaturized submarine known as
Proteus.
Their mission: to dislodge a life-threatening blood clot that Benes sustained during a failed assassination attempt by an enemy spy. Voyaging through the
bloodstream, the crew of the
Proteus
encounters numerous hazards, including an ‘arteriovenous fistula’, an attack by antibodies and white blood cells, an oxygen shortage — even deliberate sabotage by one of the crew.

Directed by Richard Fleischer, best known for Disney’s lavish live-action sci-fi adventure
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage
was scripted by Harry Kleiner (later of
Bullitt
fame) and David Duncan (The
Time Machine)
from a story by British writer Otto Klement and sci-fi buff Jerome Bixby (aka Jay Lewis Bixby), who wrote the ‘It’s A Good Life’ episode of
The Twilight Zone
and several notable
Star Trek
stories, including ‘Mirror, Mirror.’ Although the $6.5 million film — at the time, the most expensive science fiction film ever produced — was hardly a financial success,
²
Fantastic Voyage
was critically lauded for its cutting-edge special effects, colourful production design and imaginative staging by Irwin Allen alumnus Jack Martin Smith, Dale Hennessy and Harper Goff. Critics and audiences alike (mostly) forgave the hefty suspension of disbelief required to get around the spurious science and logical flaws. It was the first and last time a film featuring Raquel Welch would win three Oscars.

Many believed the film was adapted from a novel by legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, whose story
Fantastic Voyage
had been published in serial form in
The Saturday Evening Post,
and later as a novel, several months before the movie debuted in cinemas. In fact, a year earlier, Asimov had been paid five thousand dollars to write a novelization of the film’s script, initially turning down the proposal because of the story’s logic problems, mostly concerning the miniaturization of certain particles of matter. Asimov relented when told he would be allowed to modify the narrative, and make game attempts to address the more obvious examples of bad science. “I followed the plot line that existed as closely as I could,” he wrote later, “except for changing several of the more insupportable scientific inconsistencies.” Nevertheless, he added, “I was never quite satisfied with the novel, simply because I never felt it to be entirely mine.”

In 1984, by which time the novel had sold a colossal two million copies, Asimov was approached to write a belated sequel to
Fantastic Voyage.
Doubleday sent him an outline, which, he later recalled, “involved two vessels in the bloodstream, one American and one Soviet, and what followed was a kind of sub-microscopic version of World War III.” Asimov disliked the story and rejected the offer, leading the publisher to approach another science
fiction writer, Philip José Farmer, who, according to Asimov, “wrote a novel and sent in the manuscript... It dealt with World War III in the bloodstream, and it was full of action and excitement.” Although Asimov urged Doubleday to accept Farmer’s manuscript, the publisher refused, encouraging him to write a completely new book based on his own ideas. Eventually, Asimov agreed, “on the condition that I do it entirely my own way,” and
Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain
was published in 1987. Despite the title, it was not a sequel, but a re-imagining of the original story, in which a team of American and Soviet scientists, working together, are miniaturized and injected into the comatose body of a Soviet counterpart, hoping to unlock the key to the greatest scientific advance in history. “A motion picture may be made from it,” Asimov wrote in the book’s introduction, “but if so, this novel will owe nothing at all to it. For better or for worse, this novel is
mine.”