It’s odd. I’ve just read a book that I generally enjoyed, but it was a book that annoyed me to no end.<\/p>\n
The book? David Hughes’ The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Getting a movie from pitch and script to screen is a bit like running a gauntlet, and the book chronicles some twenty-odd science-fiction films that had problems getting past pitch and script.<\/p>\n
Wonder what happened to Night Skies<\/i>, the sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/i>? This book will tell you how it morphed into two films — E.T.<\/i> and Poltergeist<\/i>. The book even tells you what happened to the sequel to E.T.<\/i>, which drew upon the ideas from Night Skies<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Or what about films of The Stars My Destination<\/i> or Childhood’s End<\/i>? Those are in here, too.<\/p>\n
Then, films like Alien 3<\/i>, Superman Returns<\/i>, I Am Legend<\/i>, Watchmen<\/i>, and other major properties are chronicled.<\/p>\n
This is where the book falls short. There’s a chapter devoted to the unmade Star Trek<\/i> films, but the level of detail is cursory at best, because it covers films from Planet of the Titans<\/i> to Star Trek: The Beginning<\/i> and several in-between (Harve Bennett’s Starfleet Academy<\/i>, Walter Koenig’s In Flanders Fields<\/i>, Maurice Hurley’s Star Trek VII<\/i>, Michael Piller’s Stardust<\/i>) in the span of twenty-five pages. There’s no enough space to deal with any of these in any detail.<\/p>\n
Add to this, the book looks at films that were<\/i> made. A chapter on the Aliens<\/i> films is interesting, but there’s not much depth — the story of Alien 3<\/i> has been told elsewhere better and in more detail, while no information is given for the final two films of Joss Whedon’s trilogy that began with Alien Resurrection<\/i>. (The answer to that puzzle — it became Firefly<\/i>.) This is followed by an account of Peter Briggs’ Aliens Vs. Predator<\/i> script, but again, the information given is surface at best.<\/p>\n
The focus of the book appears to be on films that people have heard<\/i> of. People know Superman, so there’s a chapter on Superman Lives<\/i>. Everyone knows Spider-Man, so we get a chapter on James Cameron’s Spider-Man film. The Outer Limits<\/i> is a television series that everyone has at least heard<\/i> of, so there’s a chapter on that, too.<\/p>\n
Which means that other projects don’t<\/i> get a mention.<\/p>\n
There’s no chapter on Harlan Ellison’s I, Robot<\/i>, for instance. To be honest, there’s probably nothing to add to Ellison’s introduction to the published screenplay, but the absence of I, Robot<\/i> is noteworthy in a book billing itself as The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made<\/i>.<\/p>\n
(I should note that I have always felt that Warners did the right thing by not<\/i> making Ellison’s I, Robot<\/i>. They would have sunk a fuckload of money into an arthouse sci-fi movie. It would have been science-fiction’s Heaven’s Gate<\/i>.)<\/p>\n
There’s nothing on the unmade Doctor Who<\/i> films. No Last of the Time Lords<\/i>. No Leonard Nimoy film. Nothing. Of course, Jean-Marc Lofficier’s The nth Doctor<\/i> covers these films in great detail, but surely these merit some<\/i> notice in a book such as this.<\/p>\n
The most curious omission is one the book itself raises — Harry Knowles writes in his afterword that George Pal’s sequel to War of the Worlds<\/i> must surely rank as one of the greatest science-fiction films never made. There’s no reference to this elsewhere in the book. Why bring it up at all, then?<\/p>\n
And this might be a bit wide of the mark, but nothing<\/i> on John Boorman’s Lord of the Rings<\/i><\/a> film? Or any of the other attempts to bring Tolkien’s masterpiece to film? Like Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, Part 2<\/i>, which surely must<\/i> go down as a lost film?<\/p>\n At the same time, if the book is going to spend so much time on projects in development hell that finally<\/i> get made (like Watchmen<\/i> or I Am Legend<\/i>), why is there nothing on a decade of Indiana Jones<\/i> shenanigans leading to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull<\/i>? In terms of what the book is offering, this, too, seems as curious an omission as Pal’s War of the Worlds 2<\/i>.<\/p>\n This is the book’s problem. It spends too much of its time on things that were<\/i> made (like David Lynch’s Dune<\/i>, to pull out yet another example), and the level of detail isn’t much beyond a compilation of quotes and articles from Premiere<\/i>, Variety<\/i>, Entertainment Weekly<\/i>, and sources of that ilk. Works that are truly<\/i> lost and unmade merit no notice, and original research seems to be wholly lacking.<\/p>\n Here’s the thing.<\/p>\n This all sounds<\/i> harsh. And I admit, there’s a certain catharsis that came from writing it.<\/p>\n Yet, I really did<\/i> enjoy the book. The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made<\/i> is a book made for film buffs. It pulls together a lot of sources and compiles them into a cohesive story. I knew a little bit, for instance, about Night Skies<\/i>, but I didn’t quite understand how we got from that to E.T.<\/i>, and I certainly didn’t realize how Night Skies<\/i> influenced the unmade E.T. 2<\/i>. (The Book of the Green Planet<\/i> it would not have been.)<\/p>\n Just remember that the title of the book is a bit on the hype side, and you’ll be good. It really is<\/i> an enjoyable read, even if, in the end, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made<\/i> wasn’t quite what I wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s odd. I’ve just read a book that I generally enjoyed, but it was a book that annoyed me to no end. The book? David Hughes’ The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. Getting a movie from pitch and script to screen is a bit like running a gauntlet, and the book chronicles some twenty-odd science-fictionContinue reading “On Unmade Science-Fiction Films”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[4106,368,54,4089,210],"class_list":["post-1989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-film","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek","tag-watchmen","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}