Tales From Development Hell (5 page)

Shortly after the book’s publication, a French literary agent brought it to the attention of Hollywood producer Arthur P. Jacobs, aware that Jacobs was looking for “something like
King Kong”
that he could turn into a major motion picture. “He told me the story,” Jacobs later recalled, “and I said, ‘I’ll
buy it — [I] gotta buy it.’ He said, ‘I think you’re crazy, but okay.’” As Jacobs would discover after some three and a half years of rejections, the agent’s belief that
Planet of the Apes
was unfilmable was an opinion shared by many, Boulle included. “I never thought it could be made into a film,” the author later admitted. “It seemed to me too difficult, and there was a chance that it would appear ridiculous.”

Even Jacobs’ friend Charlton Heston, who had committed to the lead role within an hour of hearing the producer’s pitch on 5 June 1965, doubted that the film would ever be made. “The novel was singularly uncinematic,” said the actor. “All Arthur had was the rights to the novel and a portfolio of paintings depicting possible scenes. There wasn’t even a treatment outlining an effective script,” he added, despite the fact that
Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling had admitted spending “well over a year, and thirty or forty drafts” trying to translate Boulle’s novel to the screen. Nevertheless, the Oscar-winning star of such epics as
Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments
and
El Cid
stuck with the project through months of Development Hell, “trudging studio to studio with [Jacobs’] paintings and being laughed at: ‘No kidding, talking monkeys and rocket ships? Gedouttahere!’” He even brought an A-list director, Franklin J. Schaffner, on board when Blake Edwards, Jacobs’ original choice, moved on after spending more than a year attached to the project. Yet even the combined track record of Jacobs, Heston and Schaffner, who had directed Heston in
The War Lord,
could not get the movie made.

The problem, it seemed, was the one Boulle had foreseen: that there was every chance that a film featuring a principal cast of talking apes might appear ridiculous to a cinema audience. Finally, Jacobs convinced 20th Century Fox’s head of production, Richard D. Zanuck, to let him spend $5,000 on a makeup test, which was filmed on a jury-rigged set on 8 March 1966. “Rod Serling wrote a long, nine-page scene, a conversation between Taylor and Dr Zaius,” Jacobs recalled of the test, directed by Schaffner, and featuring Heston as the misanthropic astronaut Taylor and his
Ten Commandments
co-star Edward G. Robinson in full ape make-up as the orang-utan science minister Dr Zaius, with a young James Brolin and Linda Harrison — who would later be cast as the mute beauty Nova — as the sympathetic chimpanzees, Cornelius and Zira. “We packed the screening room with everyone we could get ahold of,” Jacobs added, “and Zanuck said, ‘If they start laughing, forget it.’ Nobody laughed. They sat there, tense, and he said, ‘Make the picture.’”

The make-up test had also impressed John Chambers, a former prosthetics designer turned Hollywood make-up artist whose innovative creations had
been seen in
Star Trek
(Mr Spock’s ears), and John Huston’s film
The List of Adrian Messenger
(completely disguising the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum for their cameos). “The make-up was crude,” he remarked of Ben Nye’s work for the test, “but they had a semblance of what they wanted. That’s how the concept was started.” Chambers was required to solve a number of problems before filming could begin. Should the evolved apes look like Neanderthal Man, like animals, or somewhere in between? How could the three subspecies in the script — and the various gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan characters — be differentiated? How could masks be made to express the actors’ own facial movements, and handle the voice projection required for sound recording? How could the make-up be applied and removed quickly enough to make filming practical?

While Chambers struggled to solve the make-up problems, the filmmakers continued to reshape the script, initially with Serling, and later with Oscar-winner Michael Wilson, a once-blacklisted screenwriter — originally uncredited on
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and
Lawrence of Arabia
due to his suspected Communist allegiances — who knew all about senseless prejudice. Wilson’s experience at Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings lent authenticity and added poignancy to the tribunal scene, the simian equivalent of a typical ‘kangaroo court’. With each new draft, the story drifted farther from its source novel, largely because Boulle’s depiction of the simians as a technologically advanced race with cars, buildings and helicopters — all re-scaled for primates — required a far larger budget than Fox would allow. “The early designs were of a very high-tech civilisation, which meant you had to design all kinds of special vehicles and buildings and so on,” Heston explained. “And Frank [Schaffner] said, ‘I don’t have enough budget as it is. Why don’t we say it’s a very primitive society, and they use horses and wagons and very primitive buildings?’ And that’s what we did.” Production designer William Creber based his revised concept drawings for the simian community on what he described as “a troglodyte city” carved into mountains in Turkey.

The greatest alteration, however, was the relocation of the book’s action from an alien planet with its own simian civilisation, to a devastated, post-holocaust Earth of the far future, 2,000 years after a nuclear war has wiped almost all traces of mankind from the face of the planet, allowing simians to become the dominant race. The terrible truth would be revealed to Taylor in the last shot of the film, when his journey into the ‘Forbidden Zone’ leads to the discovery of the wrecked Statue of Liberty, half-submerged in the desolate wasteland which is all that remains of New York City, circa 3955 AD. Although
the credit for this devastating idea has been attributed to — or appropriated by — just about everyone involved with the picture, Jacobs claimed that it came to him during an informal development meeting with Blake Edwards at a Burbank delicatessen. “As we walked out, we looked up, and there’s this big Statue of Liberty on the wall of the delicatessen,” he said. “If we never had lunch in that delicatessen, I doubt that we would have had the Statue of Liberty at the end of the picture.” Jacobs further claimed that Boulle thought the twist was “more inventive than his own ending, and wished that he had thought of it when he wrote the book.” Boulle remembered it differently. “I disliked, somewhat, the ending that was used,” he said, referring to perhaps the greatest
coup de thèâtre
in the history of cinema. “Personally, I preferred my own.”

Premièred on 8 February 1968,
Planet of the Apes
was a critical and commercial smash, grossing a staggering $26 million — more than four times the production budget of $5.8 million. “It not only grossed enormous numbers, it created a new film genre: the space opera,” Heston said later. “Fantasies set in outer space had long been a staple of the comic strips and Saturday-morning kiddie TV, but had been disdained by Hollywood,” he added, possibly explaining the studios’ initial reluctance to green-light the project.
Planet of the Apes
endured one of the most prolonged and difficult development periods of any film, only to become one of the biggest successes of the year — and a virtual lifesaver for 20th Century Fox, which, less than a year earlier, had lost a fortune, even by today’s standards, on the epic costume drama
Cleopatra.
The following year, as the first of four sequels was going into production,
Planet of the Apes
received two Academy Award nominations, famously beating out the monkey make-up of
2001: A Space Odyssey
to earn a special Oscar.

Although a number of reasons were cited for
Apes’
across-the-board appeal, it was obvious that the film worked on at least two distinct levels. “Whether by design or accident, [it] had this double appeal,” explained Maurice Evans, who ended up playing Dr Zaius in the film, and returned in the first sequel. “The appeal to youngsters [was] as a pure science fiction film, but it had a message to deliver which apparently communicated very clearly to the adult audience.” But had Schaffner set out to make a sci-fi action adventure with an intriguing premise and an unbeatable twist, or a Swiftian satire with a polemical commentary on the politically turbulent times of the late 1960s? “I had never thought of this picture in terms of being science fiction,” Schaffner asserted, echoing Pierre Boulle’s opinion of his original
novel. “It was a political film.” Indeed,
Planet of the Apes
can perhaps be viewed as symbolically similar to its most famous image, the Statue of Liberty itself: an uncomplicated political message delivered to a mass audience via a populist medium.

The first sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
was released in 1970, followed by another in each of the following three years:
Escape From the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
and
Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
Two television series followed:
Planet of the Apes
in 1974 and the animated
Return to the Planet of the Apes
in 1975, by which time the entire concept seemed to have been driven to extinction.

Nevertheless, barely two decades later, Zanuck’s “Make the picture” evolved into a different imperative: to
remake
the picture. Yet the film which
Batman
director Tim Burton was to bring to the screen in 2001 originally began not as a remake — or a “re-imagining”, as the spin doctors in 20th Century Fox’s marketing department euphemised — but as a sequel. In 1988, a twenty-one year-old film-maker called Adam Rifkin made a low budget teen flick entitled
Never on Tuesday,
with cameos by Nicolas Cage, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Although barely released and seen by few, the film so impressed Fox president Craig Baumgarten that he invited the young
auteur
to pitch anything he wanted to make. Instead, Rifkin pitched something he wanted to
re
make. “I had always been a huge
Planet of the Apes
fan,” he says, “and when Craig asked me if I had any ideas for the studio I immediately pitched him on bringing back the
Apes.
Having independent film experience, I promised I could write and direct a huge-looking film for a reasonable price, like the sequel to
Alien.”
Although made for a paltry $18 million, James Cameron’s
Aliens
looks like it cost five times that sum, and became a huge success for the studio.

Instead of pitching a story which Fox might then ask him to turn into a screenplay, Rifkin took the unusual step of pitching the trailer: “It would open on a barren desert, sand to the horizon. Then a dot would appear in the distance — very
Lawrence of Arabia.
A craggy narrator would begin telling the cryptic tale of a long forgotten race, decimated by turmoil, strife, war. All the while the dot is getting closer. It’s a shrouded man on horseback. Wearing all black, scarves hide his face from the buffeting sand. Closer and closer he rides, the narrator’s words growing in intensity. Finally, as the storyteller’s words apex with some corny, critical, euphemistic phrase, like “... and now, from out of the sand, they’re back!” the Horseman at that moment would ride into close-up. His horse would rear just as he pulled off his scarf to reveal
the face of a gorilla, bellowing a deafening war cry. The camera would then ascend up over the ape’s head to reveal an army of thousands of apes on horseback charging over the horizon.

Rifkin says that Baumgarten commissioned him to write what amounted to a sequel, “but not a sequel to the fifth film, an alternate sequel to the first film. I had pretty much decided that all anybody really remembered was some random imagery from the first film,” Rifkin explains, “particularly the end scene on the beach. All the other films were just a blur. Fox agreed, and that’s why it was decided to branch the franchise off in the direction that we did.” Rifkin describes his version as
“Spartacus
with apes. The film would open on the last scene from the first film where Charlton Heston was screaming up at the Statue of Liberty, then fade to black. A card would read: ‘300 years later’. When we would fade up, the ape empire had reached its Roman era. A descendant of Heston would eventually lead a human slave revolt against the oppressive Roman-esque apes. A real sword and sandal spectacular, monkey style.”

“The legend throughout the humans is this one man who came from space,” Rifkin elaborated to
Creative Screenwriting
magazine, “so our descendant takes on that cause.” At the same time, a power struggle has erupted within the ape empire, with gorillas and chimpanzees hovering on the brink of civil war for dominance of the planet. “The general of the gorilla army stages this
coup d’ètat,
slaughters a bunch of orang-utans, and takes control of the ape empire politics. In a way,” he added,
“Gladiator
did the same movie without the ape costumes.” Rifkin says that 20th Century Fox loved the draft. “Fox was dead set on making this movie, and fast. Their marketing department went nuts for the idea of bringing back
Apes,
which just fuelled Craig’s determination to get it into production as fast as possible.” The studio’s only request was to shorten the draft by ten or so pages, a decision he says was based more on budget concerns than creative ones. “As soon as I was to turn in the cut-down script we were to commence official pre-production. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I couldn’t believe it.” Rifkin was set to direct, with Academy Award-winning make-up man Rick Baker working on the apes, Danny Elfman
(Batman)
composing the score, “and possibly Tom Cruise or Charlie Sheen to play the young slave. Both were hot young actors at the time and were pretty much neck and neck as far as who would turn out to be the bigger star. I can’t accurately describe in words the utter euphoria I felt at knowing that I, Adam Rifkin, was going to be resurrecting
Planet of the Apes,”
he adds. “It all seemed too good to be true. I soon found out that, of course, it was.”