The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made
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.