Barbarella (film) based on Barbarella
Production
Development and writing
Having bought the film rights to Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella comics, producer Dino De Laurentiis secured a distribution deal in the United States between France's Marianne Productions and Paramount Pictures. He planned to film Danger: Diabolik, a less-expensive feature, to help cover production costs. In 1966 Roger Vadim expressed admiration for comics (particularly Charles Schulz's Peanuts), saying that he liked "the wild humor and impossible exaggeration of comic strips" and wanted to "do something in that style myself in my next film, Barbarella." Vadim saw the film as a chance to "depict a new futuristic morality ... Barbarella has [no] guilt about her body. I want to make something beautiful out of eroticism." His wife, actress Jane Fonda, noted that Vadim was a fan of science fiction; according to the director, "In science fiction, technology is everything ... The characters are so boring—they have no psychology. I want to do this film as though I had arrived on a strange planet with my camera directly on my shoulder—as though I was a reporter doing a newsreel."After Terry Southern finished writing Peter Sellers' dialogue for Casino Royale, he flew to Paris to meet Vadim and Fonda. Southern, who had known Vadim in Paris during the early 1950s, saw writing a science-fiction comedy based on a comic book as a new challenge. He enjoyed writing the script, particularly the opening striptease and the scenes with tiny robotic toys pursuing Barbarella to bite her. Southern enjoyed working with Vadim and Fonda, but he felt that De Laurentiis was intent only on making a cheap film that was not necessarily good. Southern said later, "Vadim wasn't particularly interested in the script, but he was a lot of fun, with a discerning eye for the erotic, grotesque, and the absurd. And Jane Fonda was super in all regards." Southern was surprised to see his screenplay credited to Vadim and several Italian screenwriters in addition to himself. Credited screenwriters included Claude Brulé, Vittorio Bonicelli, Clement Biddle Wood, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates, and Forest; Degas and Gates were hired by De Laurentiis after he was impressed with their work on Danger: Diabolik. Charles B. Griffith later said that he had done uncredited work on the script; the production team "hired fourteen other writers" after Southern "before they got to me. I didn't get credit because I was the last one." According to Griffith, he "rewrote about a quarter of the film that was shot, then re-shot, and I added the concept that there had been thousands of years since violence existed so that Barbarella was very clumsy all through the picture. She shoots herself in the foot and everything. It was pretty ludicrous. The stuff with Claude Dauphin and the suicide room was also part of my contribution to the film."
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