You might not believe in heaven, but you should believe in development hell. This is a place where entertainment-industry ideas go to die. Since most people are already familiar with the greatest films in movie history, we decided to look at the greatest films that, for various reasons, unfortunately didn’t survive the production phase.
Just recently, Slate published a post on the Worst Movies Never Made. While this might be a good thing, our list is a bit more of a downer if you’re a cinephile. So grab a bucket of popcorn, put your feet up, and witness what you could have been watching this weekend if it was a perfect world.
What the film was about:
Stanley Kubrick believed Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest human being ever to have lived, calling his life “an epic poem of action.” To honor the French Emperor, in 1968 Kubrick set out to make a three-hour biopic of Napoleon’s entire life, from birth to death. Kubrick become engrossed with the project, reading a reported 500 books on the subject, hiring Oxford historian Dr. Felix Markham as mentor, and watching every film on Napoleon ever made. The ambitious project was meant to include full-scale battle scenes involving around 50,000 extras, and shot on location in France, Romania, and the UK.
Why the film didn’t get made:
In 1971, three other Napoleonic films were released, and all three failed to charm audiences. Despite this bad omen, the cost of producing Kubrick’s larger-than-life film was simply too great for MGM studios to manage. Kubrick put his beloved project aside and went on to make the more financially feasible A Clockwork Orange, always hoping to one day return to his Napoleon biopic until his death in 1999.
Below is a silent video of a fan flipping through 10 books found within a giant, hollow book released by Taschen documenting Kubrick’s vast research for the film.
Comments (10)
Great feature – can’t wait to watch all the clips. There were a few I was unaware of, like Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope. Frenzy is highly underrated!
The book The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren, was optioned to death, and a movie which never was made…homosexuality and or homophobia plus terrorism just made people crazy… Paul Newman had the rights to it and sat on them… so to speak. And I quote,
“In 1975, Paul Newman’s agent, Hugh French, negotiated a one-year option on the Front Runner film rights. The script had to come first. How would the relationship be handled? The love scenes? Two men kissing? These are still big questions for actors today — and they were even bigger in 1975. The contract gave Ms. Warren the right to look at the screenplay, though not to approve it.”
More options, more nothing happened.
And more of that story at:
http://thefrontrunner.com/thefilm.html
I think The Front Runner is a possible # 11 for Great films never made. It probably still can’t be made even after Brokeback Mountain seemed to break the barrier.
awesome. really awesome. thank you!
I thought this was a great list, and a fun exercise! The only thing that saddens me is that all 10 imaginary films were films by men, about men. Do all the great films by women make it to the big screen? Or are female directors just not destined make great films? Something to think about.
maybe woman directors actually finish their projects while men of couse never quite finish any of their chores.
Don’t forget the screen adaptation of Patricia Nell Warren’s 1976 novel, The Front Runner, about a gay runner and his coach. At various times, such names as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Tom Cruise have been bandied about as associated with the project, but nothing ever came to fruition. You’d think after Brokeback Mountain, there might be more interest, but as to why it never got made, the answer is simple: Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay! Gay!
Really great feature…
Fletch by Kevin Smith would have been awesome. He was staying true to the original book and not making a vehicle for the star to ham it up for the camera.
How is Jodorowsky’s Dune not on this list? Really? Featuring Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd?
Or even Jodorowsky & David Lynch’s King Shot, featuring Marilyn Manson and Nick Nolte?
[...] what would have happened if the unfinished dream projects of several legendary directors — namely Alfred Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, David Lean’s Nostromo, and Orson Welles’s Don [...]
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