Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

For those who like to think about "what if," here's a list of movies and other projects that almost got made.  And uh . . . I guess that's all the introduction this blog entry needs.

1.  Bartholomew vs. Neff:  In 1993, John Hughes wrote this comedy about two next door neighbors who develop an escalating rivalry of practical jokes on each other.  He wrote one of the roles specifically for his best friend and favorite actor, John Candy.  To the surprise of the few people who knew about the project, Hughes, through his production company, signed Sylvester Stallone, of all people, to play the other neighbor.

At the time, Stallone was trying hard to break into comedy; his two most recent films had been Oscar and Stop!  Or my Mom Will Shoot, both of which bombed at the box office.  Stallone somehow got ahold of a copy of the script, and was intrigued by the idea that no matter how vicious things got between the two neighbors, they both remained sympathetic characters.  Candy, Hughes, and Stallone all signed on board, but Candy's death put a kibosh on the project.  According to the Hollywood rumor mill, Stallone pitched to Hughes the idea of making the movie with Danny DeVito in Candy's role, but Hughes, out of respect for his deceased friend, outright refused to proceed without Candy.  Stallone returned to the action genre instead of pursuing another comedy project.

2.  Beverly Hills Cop Die Hard:  This unimaginatively titled crossover idea was once floated about as the third entry in both franchises.  The idea behind this buddy movie was to team Bruce Willis's John McClane and Eddie Murphy's Axle Foley against terrorists in Beverly Hills.  20th Century Fox hired a writer, and an entire script was written (a page of which was later leaked to the public) but the project never went any further than that when both Fox (which owned the Die Hard franchise) and Paramount (Beverly Hills Cop) balked at the idea of a single movie having to shoulder a budget that would include the salary demands of Murphy and Willis, both of whom, at the time, were popular enough with audiences to demand record-breaking salaries.

As it turned out, Murphy's negotiating power plummetted less than a year after this decision was made, as the once box office phenom proceeded to make a series of box office flops, but by then (and possibly because of Murphy's fall from grace) Fox had already lost interest in the crossover idea, and instead hired Jonathan Hensleigh to re-write his script Simon Says as a vehicle for the Die Hard franchise.  The result was Die Hard With a Vengeance.  Incidentally, Hensleigh had written Simon Says with original characters, but his plan was to sell it to Warner Bros. as the next Lethal Weapon film; he took it to Fox only after Warners rejected the idea.  So this is really the story of two almost-made movies in one.

3.  The Man who Killed Don Quixote:  In 2000, Terry Gilliam started production on The Man who Killed Don Quixote, a typically Gilliamesque combination of comedy, fantasy, and science fiction starring Johnny Depp as a modern-day man transported back in time, where he meets literary character Don Quixote.  Depp and Gilliam ran into so many obstacles making the movie that Gilliam helped make a documentary about their troubles, Lost in LaMancha, which was released in 2002.  As recently as 2010, Depp and Gilliam were still trying to get the movie made, but various complications -- including Depp's own busy schedule and funding difficulties -- have so far prevented further development.

4.  The Odd Couple:  In the 80s and 90s, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams were both huge box office draws when it came to comedy, but despite their close friendship, and their collaborations with the annual "Comic Relief" fundraisers, they had yet to make a movie together.  So, considering their individual track records, everyone involved expected their first cinematic collaboration, Fathers' Day, to be a big financial success.  In anticipation of said success, Warner Bros. signed Crystal and Williams to star in a remake of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, but to everyone's surprise, Fathers' Day flopped at the box office, and Warners quickly abandoned The Odd Couple, preferring to pretend that the Fathers' Day embarrassment had never happened.

5.  Unmade Angel/ Buffy crossover:  Joss Whedon has been known to intentionally throw his fans off guard by leaking false information onto the Internet, so take this one with a grain of salt.  But back in 2001, the WB cancelled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Whedon and his writers, at the time, had every reason to believe that Buffy's adventures were over.  It didn't take long for their plan to kill Buffy off in the series finale to leak onto the 'net, and another, now mostly forgotten, leak appeared shortly after:  that an upcoming episode of the Buffy spin-off Angel would focus on some of the Buffy supporting characters wandering around L.A. in an attempt to find Angel and tell him of his beloved's demise.  Fans of the series know that this episode was never made, but whether this is because the idea was leaked to the public, or because of UPN's decision to immediately resurrect the Buffy series, or some other reason entirely (including the possibility that this was just Internet hogwash to begin with), we'll never know.

6.  Unmade Star Trek episodes and movies:  Any franchise that has been around for nearly half a century is bound to have a few unmade projects in its history.  After the success of Star Wars, Paramount Pictures decided to make a Star Trek movie, and arranged for a  now legendary brain-storming session involving nearly every great science fiction writer alive at the time.  Harlan Ellison and Stephen King tell a comical but apparently true tale of some of the rejected story ideas for Star Trek:  The Motion Picture in King's non-fiction book Danse Macabre, while David Hughes and Philip Kaufman give a more detailed, serious account of the same story in Hughes's book The Greatest Sci-fi Movies Never Made.  Time travel adventures to prehistoric Earth, ancient Greece, the American Revolutionary War, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor were at one time or another, considered and rejected for various reasons.  To me, every one of these sounds intriguing.

But the one almost-made Star Trek idea I would have most liked to see stems not from that legendary brain-storming meeting, but rather from another one that took place decades later.  The year 1996 marked the thirty-year anniversary of Star Trek, and Paramount wanted to do something special to celebrate.  The writing staff for Star Trek spin-off Deep Space Nine got together, and discovered that they all shared "A Piece of the Action" as one of their favorite episodes of the original Star Trek.  In "A Piece of the Action," the crew of the Enterprise discovers a planet whose entire culture is based on a book accidentally left behind by a previous Earth ship, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and to their surprise, everybody on the planet now acts, talks, and thinks like a character from an old-fashioned Hollywood gangster movie.

In the proposed DS9 sequel to that classic episode, the crew of the Defiant (the starship sometimes featured on DS9) visits the same planet and discovers that the too-suggestible inhabitants have again based their entire culture on the previous visit -- and everyone is now walking around in 23rd century Starfleet uniforms and acting like characters from the original Star Trek!

Anyway, the story goes that the writers of DS9 were discussing whether to go with this story idea or to re-visit a different classic Trek story instead, when they just happened to bump into Charlie Brill, the actor who had played a human/ Klingon spy in the fan favorite episode "The Trouble With Tribbles."  One discussion led to another, and the next thing we know, the DS9 tribute to classic Trek ends up focusing on the tribble episode instead of the gangster episode.

Don't take that as a complaint, mind you.  I loved the DS9/classic Trek crossover that resulted, and anyone who enjoys either incarnation of Star Trek would probably tell you that "Trials and Tribble-ations" is a delight.  But the other one sounds really interesting too.

So anyway, there you go.  A history of just some of the Hollywood projects that might have been had fate, in its various forms, not intervened.