Tales From Development Hell (6 page)

Days before the film was to commence pre-production, Craig Baumgarten was “quite unexpectedly and unceremoniously replaced” by what Rifkin describes as “a succession of new studio heads. Though the new heads of the studio didn’t specifically kill the project, the momentum certainly shifted from active pre-production to active development. Many new drafts were commissioned and it seemed for a while like the simple
Spartacus
parallel that I had originally intended was beginning to lose its focus and shape.” One bone of contention was that, like the original film, Rifkin’s script ended on a pessimistic note. “[Fox wanted] a happy, harmonious ending between apes and humans, this ‘we can all finally live together’ happy ending, which I always thought was a bad idea,” Rifkin told
Creative Screenwriting.
“I thought it was a little corny, because you want a hopeful ending for the characters you care about, but you still want there to be the tension between the apes and the humans for all the [proposed] sequels.”

As the script went through draft after draft, the hope of Rifkin being allowed behind the camera seemed to fade. “Eventually the script evolved to a place where, though different than the original idea, I actually liked it again. Somehow, through all this development, ideas hatched that otherwise would have never been thought of. I was excited again. But alas,” he says, “it wasn’t meant to be. Eventually, as is so often the case in studio development, my
Planet of the Apes
just died on the vine. There was no grand deceitful moment, or imposing closed door meeting that put the final nail in its coffin. Trends shift, culture changes, new ideas replace old ones and what once seemed like a great idea to a studio and its marketing department now seemed like old news.” Although he would obviously have preferred to have seen the project through, Rifkin (whose career has since included writing
Mouse Hunt
and directing
Detroit Rock City)
says he has no hard feelings: “It was my first studio job, and was a valuable personal and professional experience all the way around. It enabled me to join the Writers Guild and opened other Hollywood doors as well. All in all it was a wonderful project to be a part of, if only for a brief moment.”

It was to be several years before Fox resurrected the idea of remaking
Planet of the Apes,
this time when Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, who produced Oliver Stone’s
Natural Born Killers,
became involved. Says Murphy, “I called [Fox executive] Peter Rice, who was and is a good friend of mine, and said, ‘I have to do this. What do I gotta do?’ And he said, ‘You gotta find a director. Why don’t you find somebody interesting, like Sam Raimi?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I don’t know how to get to Sam Raimi, and I’m
not sure he’s the right guy anyway.’ And he said, ‘Well, fuck, why don’t you walk down the hall and ask Oliver?’ So I walked down the hall and asked Oliver... and he didn’t say ‘No.’” He didn’t exactly say “Yes,” either. According to the account in Jane Hamsher’s book
Killer Instinct: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade,
Stone may not have known what he got himself into. “I imagine the conversation going something like this,” Hamsher wrote. “‘So, Oliver,
Planet of the Apes,’
says Don. ‘What about it?’ says Oliver. ‘Do you like it?’ says Don. ‘Um, sure,’ says Oliver... ‘So, if I could get us involved, you’d like that, huh?’ says Don. ‘Huh? Sure, Don, whatever,’ says Oliver.” According to Hamsher, Rice responded by saying that he would only be interested if Stone would direct. “What we don’t want is an expensive executive producer.” Murphy said to leave it to him.

Before long, a top-heavy meeting was arranged at the offices of Stone’s production company, Ixtlan, with everyone present from Fox president of production Tom Jacobson, and going down through the ranks of vice presidents all the way to Rice — on whose shoulders the whole experience (not to mention his future career) was resting. What Stone said first caught everyone by surprise. “I watched the original movies again a couple of nights ago, and they were awful,” he told a stunned boardroom. “I’m only here because of Don Murphy. You should talk to him.” As Hamsher recalled, “[What followed] was the most dreadful silence I’ve ever heard in a room. Oliver had clearly gotten wind of all of Don’s shenanigans in the process, and was now hanging him out to dry.” Murphy apparently did his best to encourage the executives on the basis of marketing potential merchandising tie-ins, McDonald’s Happy Meals and the like, but it was abundantly clear that there was no
idea,
no pitch, to back up the generalisations and jargon. “The collective embarrassment level in the room was quantumly higher than anything I’ve ever registered before in my life,” Hamsher went on. “When suddenly, Oliver seemed to tune into something.”

Stone — who had mixed politics and science fiction in the television series
Wild Palms,
and written an unproduced adaptation of Alfred Bester’s sci-fi novel
The Demolished Man
— had apparently become intrigued by the prospect of time being circular, not linear, with no difference between the past and the future. “What if there were discovered cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who held the secret numeric codes to the Bible that foretold the end of civilization?” he wondered. His interpretation of
Planet of the Apes
would, as he later told
Empire,
be “a sci-fi movie that deals with the past versus the future. My concept is that there’s a code inscribed in the Bible that predicts
all historical events. The apes were there at the beginning and figured it all out.” Nevertheless, he added evasively, “I don’t want to say too much, except that the stars will be hairy.”

According to Hamsher, Fox thought almost as much of Stone’s ideas as Stone himself did. Thus, wrote Hamsher, “Oliver Stone got Fox to take exactly what they didn’t want on the project — an expensive executive producer. They called the next day and offered him a million dollars to do just that.” When the project was announced in
Variety
in late 1993, Hamsher sounded more confident than she felt about Stone’s approach. “Oliver’s notion is kind of in the Joseph Campbell-mytho [sic] vein,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s about what a separate, parallel planet might be. He’s reinvented the story with a contemporary scientist going back in time to this simian universe.” Although news that Oliver Stone might
direct
a new
Planet of the Apes
spread like wildfire, Murphy says that was never the intention — “he may have led Fox to believe that, so we could do the deal, but no” — and that he only ever intended to executive produce the film. Nevertheless, Hamsher asserts that Stone was enthusiastic about the project. Murphy agrees: “I think Oliver saw there was a very exciting story to be told and a very exciting concept in a very exciting world.” Soon the director was working closely with British-born screenwriter Terry Hayes, who had scripted two
Mad Max
sequels and
Dead Calm,
on a brand new screenplay.

Entitled
Return of the Apes,
the script opens in the present day with a plague that causes human infants to be stillborn — within six months, there won’t be a live birth on the planet, signalling the end of the human race. Geneticist Will Robinson discovers that the plague is a genetic time bomb embedded in human ‘mitochondrial DNA’ 102,000 years earlier. Hoping to save mankind, he uses a unique form of genetic time travel to journey back to a time when Palaeolithic humans were locked in a battle for the future of the planet with highly-evolved apes, one of whom plans to defeat the humans with the plague that will ensure ape dominance over Earth. Will and Billie Rae Diamond, a pregnant colleague who follows him back in time, soon discover that a young human girl named Aiv is the next step in
Homo sapiens’
evolution, and they embark on a race against time to protect her from the virus, thus ensuring the survival of the human race 102,000 years hence. Hayes’ ending is bittersweet: Billie Rae ultimately gives birth to a healthy baby boy, Adam, whose future coupling with Aiv (pronounced ‘Eve’) will effectively found the human race; however, Will and Billie Rae are unable to return to the future. (“I never worked out how to get back,” Will confesses. “Give me
some credit,” Billie Rae retorts. “I’m a scientist — I knew that.”) The closing image riffs on the ending of the original film, as Will builds a replica of the Statue of Liberty’s head, “to make sure we never forget where we came from.”

According to Hamsher, Fox chairman Peter Chernin subsequently described
Return of the Apes
as “one of the best scripts he ever read.” Yet Dylan Sellers, one of the lesser executives steering the project through Fox, thought it could be improved. “What if our main guy finds himself in Ape land, and the Apes are trying to play a game like baseball, but they’re missing one element, like the pitcher or something,” he suggested. “And when our guy comes along, he knows what they’re missing, and he shows them, and they all start playing.” In a style which is customary in such meetings, everyone agreed that it would be a great idea, while secretly having no intention of including it, or anything like it. In the meantime, two 700-pound gorillas became attached to the project: one was Australian director Phillip Noyce — who had helmed Hayes’
Dead Calm
and the Jack Ryan blockbusters
Clear and Present Danger
and
Patriot Games;
the other was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the kind of star the studio needed to justify the film’s considerable budget. Although he appeared better suited to the Charlton Heston role in a more straightforward remake of the original — a suggestion reinforced by his interest in reprising the Heston role in a mooted remake of
The Ωmega Man
— Schwarzenegger loved Hayes’ script; furthermore, he would only work with ‘A-list’ directors, and Noyce was one of them. “At one point,” Murphy recalls, “I was in the biggest meeting I’ve ever been in, with Peter Chernin, the head of the studio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Phillip Noyce to direct based on a Terry Hayes first draft; me and my ex-partner Jane to produce and Oliver Stone to executive produce, and that was all looking pretty damn good.”

Sellers refused to give up his baseball scene, however, perhaps aware that he ought to put his stamp on the project, for better or worse, in order to justify his involvement in the process. (This tendency among executives is best exemplified by the clichè, “This script is perfect. Who can we get to rewrite it?”) Thus, when Hayes handed in his next draft —
sans
baseball — Sellers fired him, a move Hamsher described as “incredibly stupid”, not least because Hayes and Noyce had remained friends since they collaborated on
Dead Calm
several years earlier. As a result, Noyce moved on. Understandably, Fox became frustrated by the distance between Fox’s approach and Hayes’ interpretation of Oliver Stone’s ideas — as Murphy put it, “Terry wrote a
Terminator,
and Fox wanted
The Flintstones”
— and, perhaps feeling that they were not getting the full value of their million dollars from Stone, decided to
take back the reins. Suddenly, says Murphy, “it turned into a whole political thing, and before you knew it we were going nowhere.” Several events occurred in rapid succession: Stone went off to pursue projects of his own; Tom Rothman replaced Tom Jacobson as head of production; a drunken Dylan Sellers crashed his car, killing a much-loved colleague and earning himself jail time; and Murphy and Hamsher were paid off.

“After they got rid of us, they brought on Chris Columbus,” says Murphy, referring to the writer of
Gremlins
and
Home Alone,
and director of
Mrs Doubtfire.
“Then I heard they did tests of apes skiing, which sounded pretty ludicrous to me.” Having recently failed to get a film based on Marvel Comics’
Fantastic Four
off the ground at Fox, Columbus teamed up with that project’s screenwriter —
Batman
scribe Sam Hamm — for a new, kiddie-friendly version of
Planet of the Apes.
As Hamm told
Creative Screenwriting,
“What we tried to do was a story that would be simultaneously an homage to the elements we liked from the original series, and would also incorporate a lot of material from [Pierre Boulle’s novel] that had been jettisoned from the earlier production. The first half of the script bears very little resemblance to the book, but a lot of the stuff in the second half comes directly from it, or is directly inspired by it.”

Hamm’s script borrowed Hayes’ device of the baby-killing virus, this time brought to Earth by an ape astronaut, whose spacecraft crashes in New York harbour. Nine months later, babies throughout the world are being born prematurely aged, dying within hours of their birth, and it is up to Dr Susan Landis, who works for the Center for Disease Control, and Alexander Troy, a scientist based at Area 51, to use the ape’s spacecraft to return to the virus’ planet of origin, hoping to find an antidote. Instead, they find an urban environment, similar to that described in Boulle’s novel, with apes in three-piece suits armed with heavy weapons, helicopters and the other trappings of civilisation — all used to hunt humans. Landis and Troy discover the antidote and return to Earth, only to find that in their seventy-four year absence, the apes have taken over the planet. Once again, Hamm puts an ironic twist on the Statue of Liberty ending, revealing a statue whose “once-proud porcelain features have been crudely chiselled into the grotesque likeness of a great grinning ape.”

Although Arnold Schwarzenegger remained attached to the new script, Fox was still not convinced that this was the version they wanted to make. And when Columbus subsequently quit the project following the death of his mother, James Cameron began talks (during the filming of
Titanic)
about the
possibility of writing and producing — but not directing — a new version, drawing on elements of the original film and its first sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
“Schwarzenegger... is talking with Jim Cameron on 20th Fox’s
Planet of the Apes,” Variety
columnist Army Archerd wrote in January 1997. “Arnold tells me Stan Winston has already created amazing apes... and although [Cameron]’s banner, Lightstorm Entertainment, does not have a ‘formal arrangement’ with 20th on
Apes,
it’s anticipated he will produce it. He loves the project and the franchise.”