RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media The WAR OF THE WORLDS movie, for those of you interested

At some point in the last few years, you guys have probably heard about plans to do a new film version of The War of the Worlds. But what you haven’t heard about is some of the political wrangling around the project. So you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take this moment to fill you in on the shenanigans surrounding this film.

In 1995, Starlog columnist-turned-screenwriter Peter Briggs wrote a WotW screenplay for Paramount (which has owned the film/TV rights for decades, and made the 1953 George Pal movie version) on spec, which took place in the book’s original Victorian England setting and implemented an alternate ending Wells had written in which the narrator hero went after the tripods with dynamite in the hopes of taking a few of them with him. (Briggs felt this ending was more cinematic than the one Wells eventually used.) Anyway, Paramount picked up the script and got Kenneth Branagh and Brian Blessed attached to make the film…but the project got derailed when Jeff Wayne, who cooked up a WotW disco musical album back in 1978 (which is still in print), kept buying up the non-cinematic European rights to the book and loudly demanded that any film version of the story be an adaptation of his musical. (That’s right, folks, WotW, after 105 years, still isn’t public domain). Since Paramount couldn’t move forward on the film without Wayne’s consent, Branagh and Blessed quit the project in disgust. Briggs, for his part, was (a) angry over Wayne’s selfishness and (b) incredulous over the idea of a WotW musical. (He claims to have asked his agent, "Tap-dancing Martians?!?!?!") Hallmark Entertainment then expressed interest in turning Briggs’ script into a TV miniseries, but a combination of Paramount’s ownership of the film/TV rights and Wayne’s refusal to budge scuttled that. Enter Tom Cruise, who liked the Briggs script and wanted to make it one of his next films. Again, he was made aware of Wayne’s blockade, and he was incensed. However, last summer, Cruise somehow managed to get Wayne off Paramount’s back, and WotW is now being planned as a film under the Cruise-Wagner production company. Furthermore, after Minority Report, Steven Spielberg threw his hat in the ring as a possible director (which was reported by Variety). However, the Wayne incident seems to have scuttled Briggs’ script, and there has been no forward movement on the project despite Cruise and Spielberg’s reported involvement.

Oddly enough, in early 2001, a low-budget, direct-to-video outfit called Pendragon Pictures (www.pendragonpictures.com) announced they would make their own WotW movie. Pendragon’s writer-director Timothy Hines, a Troma veteran, publicized his version of WotW thru AICN, claiming he had $40 million to make the film, that it would be released in 2003, and that it would be set in a modern-day Seattle that "would be reduced to a Victorian society in terms of technology." He even offered AICN’s Harry Knowles a "gruesome death" cameo. However, several things scuttled this plan:

1. Universal Studios offered to distribute the film, but backed out when Hines revealed he planned to shoot the film at NC-17 levels for "gore and bizarre nudity," with the idea of editing it down to a R. (To be honest, this makes no sense, as the book itself consists of little more than laser disintegrations, nerve gassings, and charred skeletal remains. The scene where the aliens feed off human blood intravenously hardly screams "bloodbath." The only potentially gruesome moment is when a tripod is destroyed by artillery fire and its Martian pilot blows up with it, and even that could be handled on film without gore or excessive bloodshed. At worst, the book is a PG-13 on the order of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.)
2. The events of 9/11 pushed the film back at least a year, as Pendragon decided to back off on their "modern-day Seattle" idea and go back to the 1898 England setting of the book.
3. Hines has become the target of several lawsuits, most of them due to his cheating his crew members out of their pay. (One such crew member, a model FX supervisor who worked on Alien and offered to work on WotW, wound up spending a year away from his family working for Hines and not getting paid at all. He took his case to AICN and posted updates on his pending lawsuit in the Talkback sections.) Even worse, he apparently made the rounds claiming he’d signed Matthew McConaughey, Michael Caine, and Charlize Theron to be in the film…which is going to be a non-union shoot. Needless to say, he was lying, and the SAG’s been on the lookout for him. The lawsuits against Hines and Pendragon may end up calling into question whether he ever had any film rights to the book, or if he even had the $40 million to make the film.

At any rate, Hines hasn’t given up, and late last year he claimed to AICN that Paramount acknowledged Pendragon had "certain rights" to make a WotW movie, and said that if Cruise’s intention is to make a period version of the story, "then we may have common ground on which to talk." (I swear to God, I am not making this up.)

At any rate, the Pendragon version isn't advancing any more than the Paramount version, despite Pendragon's claims to having hired Randy Rogel as their composer. Either way, this project looks to be in development hell for a long time to come.

Thoughts?

I only knew of the Pendragon version of the story, I wasn't aware that Crusie and Spielberg were interested in doing one too.

I for one think the story would work best if set today, just like the George Pal version and the 80's TV show.

I've been waiting a few years to see the Pendragon version made and at this point I don't care who does it first, I just want it to be good.

Since I happen to like the LoEG movie (nothing mindblowing, but good dumb fun--I've yet to read the comics), your example is meaningless to me.

As much as I consider Harry Knowles of AICN to be a sellout (the way he slit the throats of every Superman fan on Earth by letting himself get slipped into Jon Peters and JJ Abrams' pocket), his view on The War Of The Worlds is one that I fully agree with:

Now, I love the original George Pal version to death. Those Al Nozaki Ships just blew my mind as a child and today. Watching an I.B. Tech print of the original in 35mm is simply one of the greatest geek joys in life. I also feel that WAR OF THE WORLDS is Pal's towering achievement in filmmaking. However, unlike his TIME MACHINE, which I felt should never be remade, WAR OF THE WORLDS is one that I welcome a revisit to.

Why? Don't we have a column on this site that highlights the futility of remakes? Why would I be for a remake of WAR OF THE WORLDS?

Call me idealistic, but I believe that H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS has never been made. The original was set around the turn of the century. Mankind on Earth didn't have jets or gas-powered vehicles. WAR OF THE WORLDS was pre-WWI. The idea of an invasion from another planet at that stage of human history would have been terrifying. Ya couldn't just hook up your APPLE to the dashboard of a stolen Alien fighter and upload a virus. Heck, you couldn't even try to drop Nukes on them.
I've also dreamed my whole life of seeing those Tripod War Machines... the Black Gas Clouds of death... The rays... All the horror of a vision of earthly nightmares visited upon a world on the verge of great scientific discoveries. A world still very large and isolated. A world that still depended heavily on Horse and Buggy and Steam Powered Trains.

Updating WAR OF THE WORLDS to the here and now would be futile... Suddenly you would have something of a slight variation of INDEPENDENCE DAY or MARS ATTACKS! or others of their type....

At this point, Cruise/Wagner and Paramount Pictures have no writers or directors attached to the project. I just hope that when they bring people on, it is to make the film that the readers of H.G. Wells' classic work of science fiction have been dreaming of for well over a 100 years and have never seen on the silver screen. And whatever they do, let's hope they don't f**k it up like DREAMWORKS did THE TIME MACHINE!!!!

The point being, a modern-day WotW has been done already...several times (once bearing the name). We've been over this before. And frankly, it's gotten tired. And doing it again would be useless, a rehash of the Pal version that isn't necessary or even wanted. You might as well just buy the DVD instead and be done with it. Many in Hollywood have been DYING to do a WotW film set in the 1898 England setting. They've wanted to do it for years, but weren't able to because the FX technology wasn't up to the task until now. Legend has it that Cecil B. DeMille bailed out of making the 1953 film version because they couldn't do it as it was written in the book (the most he did was serve as an uncredited producer). Most fans of the book WANT the new version to be set in the original time period. And why not, especially if Spielberg's thinking of joining the project? If anyone can make a quality retro-style sci-fi war movie, it's Spielberg (although Peter Jackson and Gore Verbinski would be more than up to the task as well).

Further, the whole point of the book was that it was written as a critique of British imperialism. Wells was royally pissed about the massacre of the Zulu people, and he wrote WotW to show the English how unpleasant it would be for them if an advanced culture came along and decided to kill them all. The morality of the story was specific to the time period. What would be the purpose of modernizing it yet again? We're just fighting terrorists and dictators these days, we're not out to slaughter entire cultures on a whim, nor are we in a position where we're the ones being wiped out. Besides, after films like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day, The Core, and other present-day disaster films, doing WotW in the same vein would make just another cog in a tired, rusty machine. (Besides, ID4 is too fresh in people's minds to try doing WotW as a modern-day piece. People would dismiss it as an ID4 retread and ignore it.) Setting it in the original time period, by contrast, would make it a standout movie. Three-legged tanks barbecuing 19th-century London with laser fire and poison gas? Royal dreadnaughts and ironclad ships being demolished in the blink of an eye? Turn-of-the-century European nations being destroyed and deserted, being reduced to apocalyptic wastelands? (They could easily adapt some material from Kevin Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches to show the rest of the world getting mangled by the Martian invaders.) THAT is something we've not seen before on film. And it would be something fresh and unique, something that would stand apart from all the other alien invasion flicks out there. Besides, with Peter Pan, Harry Potter, and The Lord Of The Rings all getting faithful film treatments, why should WotW be denied this?

No dice. If they're not going to do this movie as a period piece, then there's no reason to make it in the first place.

(For those of you who I would much rather be talking to, it seems I was mistaken when I said the Cruise/Spielberg project wasn't going anywhere. A quick stop at www.waroftheworldsonline.com lead to a bit in the news section about Tom Cruise scouting locations in New Zealand for the movie, with Danny DeVito rumored to be joining him as a co-producer. Cruise, Spielberg, and perhaps DeVito? This might be shaping up into something good.)

I brought up LoEG not as an example of quality but as an example of what you can expect to see if the original novel were made into a movie by a Hollywood studio.

The reasoning behind adding Tom Sawyer to this movie was because 'American audiences wouldn't connect to the British characters'.

The same applies to WotW.

If done by an American studio, and set in the 19th Century, don't expect a faitful adaptation, expect something with an American lead.

I'll bring up LOEG, 'cause the current comic series deals with WotW.

"If they're not going to do this movie as a period piece, then there's no reason to make it in the first place."

Excellent points all around, King Krypton!

I've long felt if Hollywood wants to do an original story they should do so-- and STOP trying to pass them off as "adaptations" of previously-existing books. For example, one of my favorite 007 films is YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE-- but the movie has ALMOST NOTHING to do with the novel! In fact, it only recently occured to me that the climax of the book-- more or less-- appeared as-- get this-- the pre-credit sequence of the PREVIOUS movie, THUNDERBALL. So much for having any respect for writers' works...

I admire Jeff Wayne's WAR OF THE WORLDS-- although it does go on a bit long. But his obsession to the point of INTERFERENCE in other people's projects borders on lunacy. Rick Wakeman's JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH is a similar, but far more listenable project, and like WOTW, follows the book CLOSER than ANY movie project to date!

So when I think of WOTW a la H.G. Wells, the first thing that comes to mind is the voice of RICHARD BURTON. With that in mind, the first actor that pops into my head should an "accurate" film ever be made would be another Welshman-- TIMOTHY DALTON!

And speaking of INDEPENDENCE DAY... while clearly another WOTW type of story, it really bears the closest resemblance to the projhect is blatently RIPPED OFF-- and managed to beat to the theatres (despite a later starting date)-- MARS ATTACKS! As usual with me, comparing a "straight" and "comedy" version of the exact same story-- I'll take the one with the laughs!

"Why can't we all just-- get along?"
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAP!!!!!

"They HAD to change things up in order to make the movie, and what they DID come up with took two years to mount."

The George Pal movie DID scare the hell out of me the 1st time I saw it-- I about 7 or 8, maybe. But 15 years later, I saw it again-- ON A BIG SCREEN!!! It was on a reissue with WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE-- my Dad and I both agreed WOTW was far better than WWC. A classic! Same with DRACULA-- I have increasing respect for both the Lugosi & Lee versions-- and the Universal Spanish version of 1931 as well (which in some ways fulfills the promise of the Lugosi version, filmed simultaneously on the same sets with the same crew). By comparison, Coppola's is magnificent-- and the changes HE made turned out to be my favorite parts of his version (go figure). In truth, the MOST accurate DRACULA remains the BBC's version with Louis Jordan-- but so many don't consider "mere" TV versions...

"the album scared me so bad that I STILL have nightmares from it to this day"

WOW. But I know what you mean. It's probably Richard Burton that puts it across...

"Earth-- BELONGED-- to the Martians."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!!!

Of course, the idiots where I worked only joked, calling the album "Disco Dracula".

I can't fathom the Wayne interference thing. After all, look how many times 2-- or more-- versions of the same story have been filmed at the same time!!! In the 30's there were TARZANs competing with Johnny Weismuller. In '63 2 completely different adaptations of the book "RED ALERT" were filmed (by Sidney Lumet & Stanley Kubrick). In '83 James Bond appeared in 3 different films (including a TV cameo-- heehee). And Kurt Russell & Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp films came out within 6 months of each other. Sure, it's absurd, but it's happened-- and will no doubt continue to.

As for Burton... my fave film of his remains BEETLEJUICE. For so many reasons...