Comments on: Unknowable movies

By: Hal

Hal — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 02:38:07 +0000

Hahaha! Dean Stockwell as the Emperor and Dennis Hopper as Vader…”Vader wants to f***!”. Scary.

By: Hal

Hal — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 02:21:30 +0000

Forgot to mention that the dubious concept Spielberg and Melissa Mathison cooked up for Nocturnal Fears was *suspiciously similar* to Night Skies (alias Watch the Skies)! I also just found out there’s a Wikipedia entry on Night Skies too, more information can be found in John Baxter’s and Joseph McBride’s Spielberg biographies. David Hughes books aren’t bad either. I also recall that Rendezvous with Rama was in-development once as well, not to forget John Boorman’s proposed Lord of the Rings (well, Excalibur is better than Jackson’s films…at least in my eyes ) adaptation.

By: dailypop

dailypop — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 02:13:35 +0000

‘Fett is so goddamned suave,’

By: Hal

Hal — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 02:04:42 +0000

Well, there was Night Skies a sort of nasty spin-off from Close Encounters of the Third Kind which was to be scripted by John (Piranha, Alligator, Brother from Another Planet) Sayles. It featured a family under siege by vicious little aliens but with a nice ET befriending a child, however that concept metamorphosised into the benign ET The Extra-Terrestrial. Elements of Night Skies later turned up in Poltergeist and Gremlins (and arguably the non-Spielberg Critters!). Before Bryan Singer brought us the misconceived Superman Returns, producer Jon Peters was hot for the Death and Return of Superman story, bizarrely he was obsessed by the notion of Superman dressing in black and fighting a Robot Spider! Would Tim Burton’s version been better than Singer’s or *even worse*? No man can say .
Prior to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Philip Kaufman was working on a developing a version called Planet of the Titans, which could have been *interesting*. Of course, William Goldman worked on a peculiar treatment for a third Alien while both Spielberg and Tarantino have wanted to make Bond movies at different times. Off the top of my head the following projects *could* have been made, Battle Angel Aelita, Star Trek Star Fleet Academy, The Defective Detective (Gilliam), the George Miller Justice League, Superman Vs Batman, Magnum PI, Stargate SG-1 The Movie (probably the producer’s pipe dream), The Stars My Destination, a Raiders of the Last Ark sequel set in a haunted house (rejected by Spielberg because of Poltergeist, this became Temple of Doom), and *many* more. Can you imagine David Lynch’s take on Revenge/Return of the Jedi? Boba Fett singing Roy Orbison songs and The Emperor as a Pervert?!

By: dailypop

dailypop — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:38:12 +0000

That’s probably true and makes more sense than a CGi Frank Castle… but looking at the details of the Silver Surfer film who can really tell? A cosmic take on Taxi Driver? **shudder**

By: tony

tony — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:10:25 +0000

“Oh, and there was going to be a metallic, CGI version of the Punisher”.

- Mr. Hughes should do his comic book research, there was a robot minion of Galactus called the Punisher during the original Kirby/Lee run, several years before Frank Castle took the name. I imagine this is what the proposed Silver Surfer film was going to use.

By: sjv

sjv — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:54:33 +0000

ET 2? Wow… that would have been epically bad… so much so, that I strangely wish it had been made.

It’s funny… as I read that list… the two things that struck me were the horrible ET idea… and how awesome it might have been to get the “too much like the Phillip K Dick” version of Total Recall that was rejected. I haven’t seen the new movie, but I gather it is supposed to stick to the story a little more.