From Publishers Weekly
In a business that produces over 40,000 spec scripts each year, of which only 3000 are optioned, and a mere 50 made, a project that never sees the light of day isn't a failureAit's the norm. In the spirit of Film ThreatAGore's alternative movie glossyAthis book celebrates the most remarkable of aborted projects: "they might not have turned into great films," he writes, "but as ideas they were truly great." Many of these jettisoned movies are already Hollywood legends, and Gore's descriptions of the surviving material are full of promise: potential classics by Hitchcock and Wells, Garbo's comeback film, a Walt Disney/Salvador Dali collaboration called Destino. Among the star turns we'll never see are Frank Sinatra in The Jimmy Durante Story and Marilyn Monroe in Something's Gotta Give. Other ideas are intriguingly demented: Howard Stern's superhero parody Fartman, or a gangster movie about a Mafia don made out of ice cream. For some of these projects, there's still hope. The major players are still alive and the ideas are still film-ready, as is the case with The Betty Page Story, which Variety recently announced was slated to feature Liv Tyler. But as Gore demonstrates, casting the lead is merely a beginning, and a beginning doesn't get you far in Hollywood. This archive of stillborn pictures attests to the great feats of development and persuasion necessary to get a major film off the ground, and to the countless projects that crashed and burned along the way. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Think you know Hollywood movies? Think again!
No matter how many movies you've seen, no matter how many trivia contests you've won, this book is sure to have some surprises for you.
The fifty flicks featured here aren't playing at the local Google-Plex or renting at your video store. These films never actually made it to the big screen---they're the gems that got lost in the Hollywood shuffle, consigned to Development Hell. Imagine, if you will:
--Alfred Hitchcock's The Blind Man, about a pianist suddenly given the ability to see
--Destino, the surreal fusion of two gigantic artistic talents: Salvador Dali and Walt Disney
--The unmade Star Trek film, Starfleet Academy
--Greta Garbo's triumphant return to the screen that never happened, Lover and Friend
--A senior citizens' Animal House
Each movie here is a treat for the imagination, and also a lesson in the dos and (mostly) don'ts of Hollywood. In here are dramas, sci-fi flicks, comedies, sequels, animated films, and biopics certain to stir the imagination! For the movie enthusiast, this book is a speculative joy, and for the aspiring filmmaker, it's a crash course in cinematic survival.
