Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Photo: Andrew Cooper
Quentin Tarantino said many years ago that plans to retire after the tenth and final film. What the film will be is now in doubt following the announcement that he had abandoned the script, titled Film Critic, even though it had been scheduled to shoot for months.
Here's what little we know about the story. With a Taxi Driver-esque twist, it was supposed to be about a lonely, somewhat frustrated minor film reviewer writing for a fictional porn magazine in the late 1970s. A 16-year-old Tarantino, inspired by a similar person in real life, could end up as a supporting character.
There were rumors that some iconic scenes from 1970s cinema were to be remade for it (such as Rolling Thunder, written by Paul-Schroeder), and that a host of stars from Tarantino's earlier films — perhaps even playing their own early role characters – would appear in a kind of “farewell to the metaverse” send-off. The list included the names of John Travolta, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Jamie Foxx.
Tarantino has us expecting not a career-ending epic (which he believes he already achieved with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) but “more of an epilogue.” Why he canceled this film despite no statement from him has been the subject of wild speculation on the Internet. He has previously said that «most directors' latest films are fucking lousy» and perhaps the pressure of reaching the top has sent him back to the drawing board. He has turned down many other scripts in the past.
Whatever his reasoning, changing his mind about the Film Critic means he'll get a whole new plaque in the hall of fame for unmade films—those that could have been great but didn't catch on for a variety of reasons before they came to the attention of film critics . cameras. Here are the fatal eight other most infamous examples.
1. Napoleon by Stanley Kubrick
In September 1968, several hundred books about Napoleon Bonaparte were sent from Paris to Stanley Kubrick's London office. He began searching them for research materials with typically obsessive zeal. 2001: A Space Odyssey had just come out and this was supposed to be next; he planned the film — an «epic poem of action» — with a strategic bravura worthy of Boni himself. Working through draft after draft of the script, he tried out David Hemmings or Oscar Werner for the lead role, but eventually settled on Jack Nicholson as his preferred choice.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Photo: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Several factors ruined the film. In 1970, Sergei Bondarchuk's film Waterloo was released, which was a demoralizing box office failure. Kubrick attempted to revive his Napoleon later that decade, but the economy of the time had become hostile: huge rates of inflation meant that the required budget for a three-hour battle epic was too risky for any American studio. This film will haunt Kubrick for years to come, and he will probably take no solace in the fact that Ridley Scott managed to run his surprisingly humorous version.
2. «Dune» by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Half a century before Denis Villeneuve and ten years before David Lynch, the surrealist's radical vision of Dune came tantalizingly close to fruition. Jodorowsky, the underground god of his mind-bending journeys «El Topo» (1970) and «The Holy Mountain» (1973), somehow convinced a consortium of French producers that his vision could be realized, despite the script Frank Herbert had seen («This was the size of a phone book»), which would have lasted at least 11 hours on screen and would have cost $15 million.
For Jodorowsky, only Salvador Dali demanded $100,000 an hour for his role as the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV, opposite Orson Welles in the role of the «swimming fat man» Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rauta and a generally insane international cast: Gloria Swanson. , Alain Delon, Herve Villechaize, Udo Kier, Geraldine Chaplin, David Carradine. Jodorowsky's 12-year-old son Brontis will play Paul Atreides.
Impressively, nearly $10 million was raised, of which $2 million was spent in pre-production on Mobius creature designs, H.R.'s sets. Giger, special effects by Dan O'Bannon from Dark Star and music by Pink Floyd. The documentary Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) retells this quixotic saga that consumed years of many talented lives before being consumed by budget deficits.
3. Heart of Darkness by Orson Welles
In 1939, 24-year-old Orson Welles had already proven a lot with his acclaimed production of Julius Caesar and the radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds. He submitted to RKO Pictures, then one of Hollywood's five largest studios, a 174-page script based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, which he intended to make his first feature film.
Welles played Marlowe almost entirely in voice-over, because the camera had to convey the character's point of view from start to finish, and the script had a total of 165 first-person panoramic shots, carefully described. He even considered playing Colonel Kurtz, to emphasize his point about the duality of man.
Citizen Kane, 1941 Credit: Allstar Picture Library Limited./Alamy Stock Photo
It wasn't just the $1 million budget for an inexperienced director that gave RKO pause. Welles's intention to revolutionize film aesthetics clearly frightened them; the theme of lust for power worried the tycoons; and the script's stance against fascism made him a hot potato and put international relations on a knife's edge. Welles abandoned this and proceeded with Plan B: Citizen Kane.
4. Dracula by Ken Russell
At some point between Tommy (1975) and Altered States (1980), Russell wrote his take on Bram Stoker's Dracula. As might be expected, it was not a worthy literary work of prestige. He moved the story from the 1890s to the 1920s, made Lucy an opera diva and presented the Count as a depraved esthete who switches personalities. (He later accused Francis Ford Coppola of plagiarizing ideas from his 1992 version.)
Oliver Reed in 1980. Photo: GettyAmong the actors believed to have been in the frame were Peter O'Toole or Oliver Reed as the Count; Peter Ustinov as Van Helsing; Mia Farrow as Lucy; Sarah Miles as Mina and Michael York as Jonathan Harker. The most head-turning of them all is Mick Fleetwood in an unknown role. “If you had lived for centuries,” wrote Russell, “would your knees give way at the sight of the bride of a boring official and lock yourself in a gloomy castle? I would not. I came up with a reason why Dracula would want to live forever.» Alas, when Universal's Frank Langella version went into production in 1979, the bets went down on that version.
5. «Genèse» (Genesis) by Robert Bresson
Genesis: The Movie? The formidable French auteur Robert Bresson, after a string of lofty masterpieces, almost realized the idea in 1963, and Dino De Laurentiis agreed to produce it. Bresson planned to take us from the creation of the Universe to the construction of the Tower of Babel. He even did a few test shoots, but the Noah's Ark sequence turned out to be a real headache for him.
De Laurentiis recruited dozens of pairs of wild animals, but they could not be persuaded to behave as well as the donkey in Bresson's Ausar, Balthasar (1966). The director’s decision – “Only footprints will be visible in the sand” – did not inspire confidence in the producer, and the project overturned.
Much later, Bresson tried unsuccessfully to revive it in the mid-1980s, when it was to be his last film. “I want to do this so badly,” he told critic Michel Ciman in 1983. “I’ll throw myself into it like you throw yourself into the ocean.”
6. David Lynch's Ronnie Rocket
Eraserhead (1977) turned heads in the underground scene and made the prospect of a Lynch sequel very exciting. He immediately thought of one thing: Ronnie Rocket, subtitled The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence. It involved a detective attempting to enter the second dimension by standing on one leg while being pursued by the electricity-wielding «Donut People»; there was also a subplot about a teenage dwarf named Ronald D'Arte, who must be plugged into the electrical grid to survive.
Beyond these characters, the film's scope will be smokestacks, sparks, and oil slicks, and the script, according to one brief description, will contain «idealized 1950s culture, industrial design, dwarfs, and physical deformities»—essentially a blueprint for every subsequent Lynch film.
Eraserhead (1977) Photo: AP Photo/HO
The problem, as usual, was budgetary: Lynch needed to break into the big leagues with The Elephant Man (1980) and his own Dune (1984) before he could get that kind of money; and several potential sponsors went bankrupt along the way. By the time he was exploring northern England for sites, modernization had destroyed all the industrial sites he needed. «Cheap frames and graffiti ruined Ronnie Rocket's world,» he explained in 2013. The film remains in a state of indefinite hibernation.
7. Leningrad Sergio Leone: 900 days
As Leone often described it while puffing on cigars, his final film would open with a close-up of Dmitri Shostakovich's hands at the piano, searching for the notes of his seventh symphony, «Leningradskaya.» We are living in the summer of 1941, when he wrote the first three parts in the midst of a 900-day siege of the city.
In the most complex — and expensive — single shot ever conceived, Leone's camera, with the music's sharp crescendo, emerged from the composer's open window and took us through the «gaping wound» of the city at dawn. : past lines of starving Russians, corpses, abandoned funerals, flogging of captured German soldiers, trams crisscrossing the suburbs and trucks bumping through the trenches, into the steppe where a legion of 1,000 Black Panzer tanks lay. waited for the order to open fire.
Italian director Sergio Leone Photo: Jean-Jacques BERNIER
The problem was that although Leone had claimed that he would star Robert De Niro as a trapped American newsreel photographer, this was news to De Niro and no completed script ever materialized other than an idea of how start it. Although the director managed to attract a theoretical Russian funding of $15 million, he never started production before his death in 1989.
8. Guillermo del Toro «At the Mountains of Madness»
The most famous unmade film of this century is probably del Toro's long-running adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous novel. This tale of an Antarctic journey that veers off course into the jaws of a lost alien civilization could hardly be more in tune with all of del Toro's nightmarish obsessions. As with almost all the films on this list, traces of this project crop up in many of the director's other films before and after he almost made it.
Filming was completed in June 2011, with Tom Cruise playing the lead role of a climbing explorer, and James Cameron producing. The sticking point was how terrible all these tentacle encounters would have been: Universal was unwilling to pay for the film's $150 budget if del Toro intended to make something with a commercially risky R rating. They tried to talk him into lowering the PG-13 rating , but he couldn't do it with Lovecraft. So production collapsed. However, Del Toro did not give up on the author and recently managed to adapt two of his stories for the Netflix anthology show Kunstkamera.
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