Video Scripts: Silver Bullet, Last Action Hero, Children of Men
Cody shares another batch of videos he wrote for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; one for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and two for the JoBlo Originals channel.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series, I wrote about the 1985 Stephen King adaptation Silver Bullet, the only film from director Dan Attias:
Silver Bullet script:
INTRO: Written by master of literary horror Stephen King, Silver Bullet is about a werewolf terrorizing a small town in Maine. The only people who can stop it are an ad-libbing Gary Busey, playing an unruly uncle. And two kids: a teen girl, and her paraplegic little brother, who is played by Corey Haim and gets around in a souped-up, gas-powered wheelchair. The movie is just as cool as it sounds, and not only deserves to be ranked highly as one of the best werewolf movies ever made. It might also be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: It all started when Christopher Zavista of Land of Enchantment Press had the clever idea to pair the artwork of Bernie Wrightson with the words of Stephen King for a calendar project. King would write a short story that would be separated into twelve vignettes, one for every month. And Wrightson would provide the art that would accompany each month’s vignette. Tasked with writing something that would play out over twelve months, King decided to build the story around the lunar cycle. Each vignette would be about a werewolf terrorizing the small town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine during the monthly full moon. Then he took liberties with the lunar cycle so the werewolf attacks could take place on certain holidays. Valentine’s Day, Independence Day, New Year’s Eve.
King said the idea appealed to him because, “Here we can have twenty-three new and interesting murders, sort of like Friday the 13th.” But he didn’t just want to write a series of murder scenes, or as he called it, “Snuff stuff: set ‘em up and knock ‘em down like dominoes.” He wanted the murders to have an interesting story happening around them. And once he figured out the story and characters, he ran into another problem. He found it difficult to write something short enough to fit on a calendar page. So the story grew bigger, until Land of Enchantment had to change the plan. This wouldn’t be a calendar, it would be a novella, with Wrightson still on board to provide illustrations that would appear throughout the book.
With a page count of one hundred and twenty-seven, the King and Wrightson collaboration was published under the title Cycle of the Werewolf in November of 1983. The film rights were immediately snatched up by producer Dino De Laurentiis, who made several King adaptations over the years: The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cat’s Eye, Sometimes They Come Back.
Retitled Silver Bullet, the adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf passed through the hands of a few different writers. Then Stephen King ended up writing the screenplay himself. Daniel Attias, who had previously worked as a second assistant director on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Twilight Zone: The Movie, was given the opportunity to make his directorial debut with this project.
Silver Bullet is very simple, as you would expect from something that originated as an idea for a calendar. People are being killed in Tarker’s Mills, their bodies left a mangled mess. The town’s residents are terrified, and the local authorities – led by Terry O’Quinn as Sheriff Haller – don’t know how to handle the situation. The first person to suspect the killer is a werewolf and not your average homicidal maniac is a young boy named Marty Coslaw. Played by Corey Haim. At first, Marty is the only one who believes a werewolf is to blame. But soon he’s able to convince his sister Jane, played by Megan Follows. And eventually their alcoholic Uncle Red, played by Gary Busey, is pulled into the werewolf insanity as well. By the time Uncle Red gets involved, Marty and Jane even know who the werewolf is. That’s because Marty was attacked by the werewolf while setting off fireworks, and managed to blast out one of the creature’s eyes with a bottle rocket. The Tarker’s Mills resident who starts wearing an eyepatch after that incident is Reverend Lowe, played by Everett McGill. And yes, when the werewolf is on screen, that was also McGill inside the costume.
The story of the film is being told to the audience by an older Jane, with Tovah Feldshuh providing a voiceover narration that feels largely unnecessary. Because of this storytelling decision, the film takes place nine years before its 1985 release… But there’s no evidence on screen that there was any attempt to make the movie look like it was set in 1976. Vehicles as recent as 1983 models can be spotted in the background. The ‘76 setting wasn’t specified in King’s screenplay and comes off like a questionable choice made in post-production.
BACKGROUND: Daniel Attias wasn’t the first director considered for Silver Bullet. The first filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis approached about bringing King’s story to the screen was Phantasm director Don Coscarelli. The producer had been impressed by Coscarelli’s work on The Beastmaster, and originally got in contact with him to offer him the chance to direct Conan the Destroyer. When Coscarelli turned that one down, De Laurentiis offered him Silver Bullet instead. A Stephen King werewolf movie was an offer Coscarelli couldn’t refuse. He took the job. A draft of the script had already been written at that point, but De Laurentiis wasn’t happy with it. Coscarelli would have to rework it, and De Laurentiis wanted him to write it with Sergio Altieri. Altieri would go on to earn a lot of writing credits, but he wasn’t known as a writer at that time. He worked for the producer as a translator, taking English documents and translating them into De Laurentiis’s first language, Italian. Coscarelli went along with the idea of writing the script with Altieri anyway. They decided to keep the monthly format of King’s story and divided up the sections: Coscarelli would write one month, Altieri would write another month, and so on. When Coscarelli and Altieri turned in their script, they ran into trouble. De Laurentiis didn’t like it, and wanted to get rid of the monthly structure. Cycle of the Werewolf played out over a year, but Silver Bullet was going to have a condensed time frame.
This is when De Laurentiis asked King to write the screenplay himself. But King declined because he was too busy. Instead of writing the script, King said he would look at the Coscarelli and Altieri draft and give them notes on how to improve it. Coscarelli knew the script wasn’t in perfect shape, so he welcomed King’s opinion… and when King sent in his notes on the script, Coscarelli was very happy. As far as he was concerned, King had found a way to solve all of the script’s problems. De Laurentiis didn’t agree. During an interview on the KingCast podcast, Coscarelli said the producer gave King’s notes a quick look, without even asking Altieri to translate them for him, and then tossed them in the trash. In that moment, Coscarelli realized making Silver Bullet wasn’t going to be a good experience for him. So he left the project.
De Laurentiis was able to convince King to write the script after Coscarelli dropped out. And Daniel Attias caught the producer’s attention because his agent specialized in representing young talent who could be hired for lower costs. Attias was brought in for a meeting, impressed De Laurentiis with his Silver Bullet pitch, and got the job. All these decades later, Silver Bullet remains the only feature film Attias has ever directed. But the director has been working steadily ever since. His focus has just been on television instead of films, and in the world of TV he has racked up nearly one hundred directing credits. Which is why he was qualified to write a book called Directing Great Television.
The script wasn’t the only issue De Laurentiis had with Coscarelli’s approach to the adaptation. The producer was also unhappy with how Coscarelli wanted to handle the werewolf sequences. Knowing how difficult it was to make werewolf effects look convincing, Coscarelli wanted to shoot the attacks like the shark attack scenes in Jaws. The werewolf would be kept off screen as much as possible, and the reveal of the creature would be saved for late in the running time. De Laurentiis objected. The werewolf effects were being done by Carlo Rambaldi, an Oscar winner for his work on King Kong 1976, Alien, and E.T. He wanted to show this thing off and give the full reveal right in the opening attack scene. But it’s worth noting that De Laurentiis did not get what he wanted in the finished film. The werewolf attacks are shot just like Coscarelli suggested they should be. The creature is kept off screen or obscured for most of the movie. We get our best look at it in the climactic scene. And when we do see the full reveal, it’s not exactly mind-blowing. Because werewolves are very difficult creatures to bring to life on screen.
It’s not surprising that Attias took the Jaws approach to Silver Bullet, since he had worked with Steven Spielberg. While making decisions on the set of the film, he would sometimes even ask himself, “What would Spielberg do?” He also tried to keep the werewolf hidden because he wasn’t impressed by Rambaldi’s design. It didn’t have many animatronics in the face to create expressions, and Attias thought it looked more like a bear than a werewolf.
Another challenge Attias faced is the fact that the cinematographer De Laurentiis hired was Armando Nannuzzi, an Italian who didn’t speak a word of English. Attias didn’t speak any Italian. But he and Nannuzzi did both speak a little French, so they were able to communicate in that language. It all worked out in the long run, and Silver Bullet turned out to be a good looking movie. Nannuzzi was also the cinematographer on the next King adaptation De Laurentiis produced, Maximum Overdrive. A film that was directed by King himself. The cinematographer lost an eye in an accident on the set of that film, but he didn’t let that stop him from continuing to do his job.
The climax of Silver Bullet takes place on Halloween night, so the film was given an appropriate release date of October 11th in 1985. The reviews weren’t very positive, but it did well enough at the box office. Made on a budget of seven million dollars, it ended up earning just over twelve million before heading to home video. The movie has had a solid cult following ever since it was first released, but still doesn’t seem to receive as much positive attention as it should. It may not feature one of the coolest werewolves you’ve ever seen, but it is an excellent werewolf story nonetheless. And deserves to be recognized as one of the best werewolf movies we’ve ever gotten.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: If you want werewolf action, Silver Bullet has plenty of it. The first half of the film is packed with werewolf attack sequences, separated by short scenes that establish the lead characters. And show how the mysterious murder spree is affecting the townspeople. While trying to figure out how to fill the movie with werewolf attacks without showing too much of the werewolf, Coscarelli came up with a cool idea. A sequence that would show people getting picked off by the werewolf while it’s hiding within a thick ground fog. You know it was a cool idea because that sequence is still in the movie, despite the fact that it wasn’t written or directed by Coscarelli.
Once the film is past the halfway point, it shifts gears. Werewolf moments come less frequently. Around this time, Marty’s werewolf suspicions are confirmed. And from then on, the movie is about Marty, Jane, and Uncle Red taking it upon themselves to end this monstrous threat. It still works because these are good characters and we want to see how this trio is going to manage to take out a werewolf. There’s also great cat and mouse tension in the second half, because Reverend Lowe is aware that Marty is suspicious of him. This allows for a very unique scene in which Lowe tries to run Marty down in his car. While Marty is driving the souped-up wheelchair Uncle Red made for him. A wheelchair that’s called Silver Bullet and can go as fast as any other vehicle on the road. There aren’t many movies that feature vehicular chases involving wheelchairs. And you definitely don’t expect to see that sort of thing in a werewolf movie.
There are times when Silver Bullet feels like a movie that’s in conflict with itself. Attias wanted it to be a PG-13 adventure that kids could go see. There are times when the score composed by Jay Chattaway and the voiceover narration play into that. But De Laurentiis wanted this to be bloody and R-rated, so he kept making a reluctant Attias add in gore. The resulting film is a mixture of bloodshed that will satisfy adult horror fans. And scenes like Marty’s wheelchair races, which will be more appealing to younger viewers. So while Silver Bullet is a good gateway horror movie for monster kids, it probably shouldn’t be their first werewolf movie because of the intensity of the attack scenes. Save this one for after they’ve seen The Monster Squad.
King didn’t tell exactly how Lowe became a werewolf in Cycle of the Werewolf, and that information isn’t in Silver Bullet, either. Attias has his own theory, though – and it really shows how deeply he cared for and understood the characters. During an interview on the Portalville podcast, Attias said he saw Silver Bullet as a film that’s about disabilities and how people deal with them. Marty has the most obvious disability, but other characters have them as well. And Attias figured that, “You become a monster if you can’t accept your own wounds. If you can’t really look at your imperfections or the things that give you pain. If you deny them, it comes back in much fuller force. So I started to think of the Reverend as a character who had this view of himself where he had to be puritanically perfect. He’s deeply repressed, and then he becomes a monster. And then I thought Uncle Red has his own disability, he can’t face his life, he can’t face that he’s an alcoholic. He’s also avoiding his world. Marty is the hero because he’s the only one who accepts it. He says, ‘Okay, this is the hand I got dealt. I’m not going to deny it.’ And therefore he has access to greater knowledge and greater understanding of those who have been denying it.”
BEST SCENE(S): Attias’s read on the material is clear in a scene where we see Marty experiencing a rare moment of depression. Watching other kids play baseball, he’s feeling sad that he can’t join in. Because he’s distracted by this, he doesn’t notice that Lowe is stalking him… And that leads into the car chase.
Some of the best scenes in the movie are the ones involving Uncle Red. Which are especially entertaining because Gary Busey was allowed to improvise some of his lines. Uncle Red often comes off as comic relief, but he has some strong dramatic moments as well. And his most dramatic scene was added by Attias, who let Busey and Robin Groves, who plays Red’s sister Nan – the mother of Marty and Jane – improv their way through a serious discussion between siblings. Red disagrees with the way Nan treats Marty and handles his disability. Nan feels Red’s poor decisions in life are a bad influence on Marty. It’s a terrific scene that shows Silver Bullet had more on its mind than just werewolf action and gore.
Of course, when it is focusing on werewolf action and gore, that’s really awesome too.
PARTING SHOT: King has said Silver Bullet is probably the only movie ever made to be based on an idea that was originally only supposed to be a calendar. Chances are he’s right about that. But it’s interesting to see how good a movie based on a calendar idea can turn out to be. Silver Bullet doesn’t have the best looking werewolf, but that dodgy looking werewolf is at the center of some very memorable moments. And when the werewolf isn’t on its rampage, we get to spend time with interesting characters perfectly brought to life by the film’s cast.
Some odd choices were made along the way, but for the most part Daniel Attias delivered a very solid horror movie with his directorial debut. It’s enough to make you wish that he had made more features over the years. Especially more horror features. But if this is the only movie Attias ever makes, at least he gave us one of the all-time best werewolf movies before he went over to television. A great Stephen King movie that still holds up decades later.
For the non-horror Revisited series, I looked back at director John McTiernan's 1993 film Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. A movie that was considered to be a disaster when it was first released:
Last Action Hero script:
INTRO: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s follow-up to the incredible success of Terminator 2, Last Action Hero was supposed to be something special. A movie that would add another awesome action spectacle to Schwarzenegger’s filmography, while also evoking the wonder of kid-friendly classics like E.T. and The Wizard of Oz. Instead, it was a bomb, best remembered for its messy development process, bad marketing decisions, and squandered potential. But is Last Action Hero really a bad movie? Let’s dig into it and find out with this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: Zak Penn and Adam Leff were fresh out of college when they sat down to write a screenplay called Extremely Violent. A satire of the action genre, their script skewered the clichés by dropping an action movie fan into the middle of the mayhem. Imagine if the Randy character from Scream had found himself inside one of his favorite horror movies instead of being attacked by a slasher in his own reality. Extremely Violent centered on a young kid named Danny, who is grieving the death of his father. But rather than face his pain, he tries to push it aside and distract himself through entertainment. When he goes to see a special screening of a new action movie called Extremely Violent, he escapes into a movie in a more literal way than he ever imagined. He finds himself transported into the film, becoming the action hero’s sidekick. Dodging bullets and riding shotgun during chase scenes. And since he is so familiar with the formula of action movies, he’s always several steps ahead of the story and the hero. Speaking with Empire magazine, Penn confirmed that he and Leff did their homework, making sure their movie-within-a-movie would play just like the action flicks that could be found in the nearest video store. He said, “We rented every action movie we could think of and made a checklist. Does the second-most evil bad guy die before or after the most evil bad guy? Does the hero have a Vietnam buddy? It was fun, although watching Steven Seagal movies one after another can be soul-crushing.”
Once the script was complete, they got it into the hands of agent Chris Moore, who would go on to be a major producer himself. You might have seen him on Project Greenlight. Moore thought the Extremely Violent script was great. A modern day version of The Wizard of Oz, with the kid going into an action movie instead of going to the land of Oz. A bidding war broke out between the studios, they all wanted that script. But Columbia Pictures came out the winner with a bid of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Penn and Leff wrote the script with one particular action hero in mind. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their inspiration is obvious in the name they gave the action hero: Arno Slater. They didn’t really expect that their script would get made into a movie that would star Schwarzenegger… But then Schwarzenegger actually signed on to the project. Unfortunately for them, the movie that ended up being made with their ideal star in the lead isn’t what Penn and Leff wrote. The title was changed to Last Action Hero and the hero’s name was changed to Jack Slater. And nearly everything else was changed along the way. Last Action Hero only resembles Extremely Violent in the basics: it is about a kid named Danny, who has lost his dad and is a fan of action movies, getting pulled into a movie and becoming a sidekick to his favorite hero. But from the explanation for how Danny gets into the movie to the adventure he and Jack Slater go on, it’s all different from what Penn and Leff wrote.
Schwarzenegger felt the Extremely Violent script was too violent. And why wouldn’t it be? Violence was promised right there in the name. He also felt the script wasn’t written on a professional level. Which could make sense from his perspective, since he was used to seeing scripts from Hollywood’s top writers and this one was written by two beginners. So Columbia Pictures hired one of those top writers to revise the script: Shane Black, who had written Lethal Weapon and recently sold the script for The Last Boy Scout for just under two million dollars. Penn and Leff found it amusing that the writer of some of the action movies that had given them moments to satirize in their script was now reworking their script. Black was aided by his friend David Arnott while doing the revisions. And Black and Arnott changed the script so substantially, they ended up earning the screenplay credit on the finished film, while Penn and Leff only receive story credit.
Last Action Hero isn’t exactly what Black and Arnott wrote, either. More writers worked on the script after they were finished. Which is somewhat surprising, given that John McTiernan, who had worked with both Schwarzenegger and Black on Predator, signed on to direct Last Action Hero. McTiernan was such a fan of Black’s writing, he had given Black an acting role in Predator in hopes that he would touch up the script while they were on set. Something Black has said he didn’t actually do. But he wasn’t quite satisfied with what Black and Arnott had written for Last Action Hero. So he called in some other script doctors. Like Larry Ferguson, who he had worked with on The Hunt for Red October. The script was polished by Star Wars star and Postcards from the Edge writer Carrie Fisher, who did a lot of script doctor work in the ‘90s. And William Goldman, the Oscar winning writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, was paid one million dollars to tinker with the script for four weeks.
Despite all the changes that were being made and the money that was being spent, it was clear that Last Action Hero wasn’t shaping up to be what anyone was hoping it would be. After extensive rewrites had been done, Black was even asked to come back and work on the script some more. He declined. McTiernan was running out of time to worry about the script anyway. Columbia Pictures had already announced a June 18, 1993 release for Last Action Hero – a date that was just nine and a half months away from when they gave the film a greenlight. Now McTiernan just had to get this thing done and ready for its premiere. The release date Columbia chose was one week after Universal was going to release Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. But the studio wasn’t concerned. Spielberg’s previous movie had been the critical and financial disappointment Hook. (Which Carrie Fisher also worked on as a script doctor.) They took Hook’s reception as a sign that the days of Spielberg movies being a big deal were over. They believed that Last Action Hero was going to be a juggernaut that would easily crush Jurassic Park. They were mistaken.
REVIEW: A lot has been said over the decades about the rewrites ruining Last Action Hero, but some of the changes were actually improvements. In the original script, Danny ends up inside the movie because he’s being toyed with by a demon. The projectionist in the theatre is an ancient evil being who is trying to manipulate the kid into becoming a vengeful killer. The point of putting him through the action movie scenario is to get Danny to shoot the projectionist when he returns to his own reality. And then, supposedly, the demon would claim his soul. The rewrites turned the reality-bending adventure into something that’s just fun. There’s emotional weight to Danny and Jack’s interactions and of course they both learn lessons from the time spent with each other. But there are no demons and no souls at stake. Danny ends up in the movie, the latest entry in his beloved Jack Slater franchise, because he has a magic ticket. A ticket given to him by the friendly old projectionist Nick, played by Robert Prosky. This ticket has passed through the hands of the world’s greatest magicians, and was given to Nick by Harry Houdini. It was said to be a passport to another world… and that turns out to be true.
Penn and Leff were fans of McTiernan’s previous work, but felt he was an odd choice for Last Action Hero because there had been no indication that he had the right sensibility for the material. He was a maker of serious action movies, not genre-skewering parodies. They had imagined someone like The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London director John Landis directing the film. Or Robert Zemeckis, the director of Used Cars, Romancing the Stone, and Back to the Future. Someone they knew would have fun deconstructing action clichés. As Penn said, “It’s easier for someone from the outside to mock the conventions of action movies than it is for the people who created them in the first place.”
McTiernan has admitted that his movie struggles to find the right tone. He wanted it to be a mixture of action and the heartwarming feeling of E.T. But he had trouble achieving that. The movie’s struggle with tone is clear in the scenes set in the world of Jack Slater 4. The idea had been that Danny would be in a straightforward action movie along the lines of Lethal Weapon, and the action movie would then become comedic because the kid knows so much about the genre. Instead, McTiernan and the script doctors sent Danny into a world that’s already a parody of Hollywood films. The movie world comes off like a live-action cartoon… and it’s not even entirely live-action, because one of Jack’s fellow police officers is an animated cat. Whiskers, voiced by Danny DeVito. The characters aren’t just inside one movie, it’s like they’re living in the world of every major studio film that had ever been released.
There are some cute jokes along the way, the most popular being when Danny realizes that Sylvester Stallone starred in Terminator 2 in the world of Jack Slater 4. And the movie still remembers to make a mockery of some action movie clichés. Like Jack’s always angry and screaming superior Dekker, played by Frank McRae. And the traitorous friend, played by F. Murray Abraham. But the humor goes so far over-the-top, you can tell the filmmakers strayed from the point along the way. The action is fun, but in a ridiculous way. There’s even a sequence built around the funeral of a gangster called Leo the Fart. Whose corpse has been packed full of nerve gas, ensuring he’ll be exiting the world with a deadly case of flatulence. That was a Shane Black addition. There’s never a serious element to the action sequences in the Jack Slater 4 reality, there’s no danger. Jack Slater is supernaturally strong and capable. But he loses some of his ability when he enters Danny’s reality in the second half of the film. In that world, he can get hurt.
Here’s where the magic ticket brings more entertainment into the movie, as he ends up in the hands of an assassin called Mister Benedict. A William Goldman addition, brought to the screen through a scenery-chewing, fourth wall breaking performance from Charles Dance. Benedict realizes he can use the ticket to pass into another world. One where he can get away with more evil deeds, as they go unnoticed in Danny’s harsh reality. His first scheme is to assassinate Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Jack Slater 4 premiere. To pull this off, he pulls another villain out of the Jack Slater franchise. The Ripper, an axe-wielding serial killer who was played by Tom Noonan in Jack Slater 3. A character who even managed to kill Jack’s young son in that film’s tragic ending. Noonan plays a great creep, and the fact that Jack lost a son brings an interesting dynamic to his dealings with Danny, who lost his dad. McTiernan and the writers could have played up the surrogate father and son element more than they did.
For a movie that gets so absurd at times, Last Action Hero becomes surprisingly grounded in the end. While Benedict toys with the idea of bringing cinematic icons like Dracula, King Kong, and Freddy Krueger into Danny’s world… and something like that did happen in some drafts of the script… he doesn’t go ahead with it. We can only imagine what could have been. The movie wraps up simply, with two rooftop confrontations back-to-back. Jack faces off with The Ripper, then he faces off with Benedict. There’s not much to it. But we do see Jack succeed in saving Danny’s life in a situation just like the one where he failed to save his son’s life. And it’s harrowing enough to leave Jack seriously wounded. So it works.
The magic ticket shenanigans allow for a fun moment where Jack Slater and Arnold Schwarzenegger come face-to-face. And Jack makes it clear that he’s not fond of the actor who has put him through hell just by making movies. Better than that, the magic ticket brings Death out of the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, just as Jack is on the verge of dying. Danny and Jack get to talk to Death, and it’s a great cameo for Ian McKellen.
Shane Black has said that the casting of Danny in Last Action Hero was “one of the absolute misfires of Western culture”, but child actor Austin O’Brien actually did well with the material he was given. Danny is a good stand-in for members of the generation of kids who grew up watching the action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s. If you’re a movie fan of a certain age, you might see some of yourself reflected in this character. A kid who would prefer a Schwarzenegger version of Hamlet over a faithful adaptation.
Last Action Hero features some good supporting turns from Anthony Quinn as Benedict’s boss. Who isn’t nearly the threat his henchman is. Art Carney, in his final film role, as Jack’s ill-fated cousin. Mercedes Ruehl as Danny’s mother. Who bonds with Jack when he follows Danny home. And an underused Bridgette Wilson as Jack’s daughter Whitney. It’s also nice to see Professor Toru Tanaka in there as a villainous bodyguard.
Screenwriter Zak Penn earned his Screen Actors Guild membership when he was offered a small role as a police officer. But you probably won’t spot him in the movie. He had been on set for a couple weeks before he realized that he was being positioned outside of the frame for all of his scenes. The film does feature an onslaught of largely unnecessary and pointless cameos from the likes of Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Little Richard, Tina Turner, Jim Belushi, and Damon Wayans. Jean-Claude Van Damme gets a moment. Chevy Chase shows up just long enough to almost get knocked down. But other than Ian McKellen as Death, the best cameo in the film is the appearance by Schwarzenegger’s then-wife Maria Shriver. Who is embarrassed to see her husband promote Planet Hollywood on the red carpet.
LEGACY/NOW: Post-production on Last Action Hero was a rushed process that was made even more complicated when a test screening was held. The audience’s reaction was so negative, it was considered a disaster. The decision was made to reshoot the ending. And by the time the additional photography was finished, they were only three weeks away from the release date Columbia refused to budge from. They were going to take on Jurassic Park – and attempted to do so by hyping Last Action Hero as the greatest action movie ever made. Studio chairman Mark Canton called the film the best thing he had ever done. Schwarzenegger was confident he had made another summer blockbuster. A promotional tie-in with Burger King was secured. A toy line was created – and Schwarzenegger insisted that the Jack Slater action figure not have a weapon. A soundtrack was assembled that featured the likes of AC/DC, Anthrax, Megadeth, Alice in Chains, Def Leppard, Aerosmith, Cypress Hill, Fishbone, Queensryche, Tesla, and Buckethead. For no reason other than extravagance, the studio paid to have the title of the movie painted on the side of an unmanned rocket that NASA was launching into space. Due to a glitch, that rocket didn’t even get off the ground until months after the movie was released. Columbia also placed a seventy-five foot tall balloon of Schwarzenegger holding dynamite in the middle of Times Square. Given that this was immediately after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the dynamite was considered to be in poor taste. So that balloon was quickly deflated. None of this helped the troubled production overcome the allure of Spielberg’s dinosaur movie.
Jurassic Park reached theatres on June 11th and the movie – which had a sixty-three million dollar budget – earned around fifty million over its opening weekend. As we all know, it was a massive hit that made nine hundred and seventy million at the global box office that year. Those are 1993 dollars. Last Action Hero hit the big screen on June 18th… and had an opening weekend of just fifteen-point-three million. Just barely enough to cover the fifteen million Schwarzenegger had been given to star in the movie. With a budget in the eighty-five million dollar range, the film ended up pulling in a total of one hundred and thirty-seven million dollars at the global box office. Considering the budget, the star power, and the money and effort Columbia put into hyping it, it was a total misfire.
But the film has found an appreciative audience… and many of its fans are the viewers who were around Danny’s age when it was first released. The kids who watched all the same movies he had seen. Who were experts on R-rated action flicks before they even reached their teens. When they watched Last Action Hero, they could enjoy seeing someone like them go on an adventure with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And they were still young enough to find some of the sillier humor amusing. For viewers who have been enjoying the movie since the beginning, it now has nostalgia working in its favor as well. But it’s also easier for new viewers to enjoy Last Action Hero these days, since we’re far removed from the excessive hype, the unmet expectations, and the negativity about the project. Now you can just take it in for what it is: something that turned out to be a fun piece of entertainment despite all the questionable decisions that went into it. It’s not the greatest action movie ever made. It’s more like an intriguing curiosity. But it’s not a bad way to spend two hours, and ranks up there as one of the most expensive cult movies ever made.
Also for the Revisited series, I wrote about the 2006 dystopian thriller Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, this one deserves to be a lot more popular than it is:
Children of Men script:
INTRO: In the early years of this century, a lot of fans were hoping Clive Owen would be the next James Bond. He never was cast as that character, but that hasn’t held him back from having a great career. One of his best movies came out the same year Daniel Craig made his Bond debut in Casino Royale. It’s a dark action film set in a dystopian future, where the fate of humanity lies in the hands of Owen’s character. A depressed alcoholic who doesn’t have the right footwear for the dangerous journey he’s on. The film is Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and it’s time for it to be Revisited.
SET-UP: Children of Men began with a 1992 novel written by P.D. James, also known as Baroness James of Holland Park. An author who had her greatest success with a series of mystery novels featuring a detective named Adam Dalgliesh. The novel The Children of Men was something out of the norm for James, as it wasn’t a mystery novel. It was a story set in the dystopian future of 2021, a time when society is collapsing and humanity is on the verge of extinction. That’s because no one has gotten pregnant since the sperm count of human males dropped to zero back in 1994. Democracy has been abolished in England. The country is run by a man who has appointed himself Warden of England. At the center of the story is the Warden’s cousin, a doctor named Theo Faron. Theo is first contacted by a dissident group called the Five Fishes because they want him to talk to his cousin and try to restore democracy in the country. But things don’t go as hoped, and the Warden decides to target the dissidents. So then Theo tries to help the Fishes as they go on the run. It’s very important that one member in particular, a woman named Julian, be kept safe. Because she is the first human female to get pregnant since the ‘90s.
In 1996, a production company called Beacon Pictures contacted James about making an adaptation of the novel. And they proved they were passionate about the material, because it took almost a year of negotiations to close the deal. James had specific requests she needed to make sure Beacon would follow through on before she would hand over the rights. For one thing, she demanded that Children of Men be adapted as a film, not for television. At the end of the negotiations, James was paid an amount somewhere in the mid-six-figures and Beacon got the rights. The adaptation then officially went into development – and passed through the hands of multiple screenwriters over the next few years. American Perfekt writer/director Paul Chart wrote the first draft. But the script changed so substantially as development continued, Chart isn’t credited on the finished film. His draft was rewritten by future Iron Man and Cowboys & Aliens writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby. In 2001, Beacon hired Alfonso Cuarón – the director of Great Expectations and Y tu mamá también – to take the helm of the project. Cuarón then set out to rework the script with his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton, who would go on to be a writer and producer on Chicago P.D. At that time, the goal was to start filming in 2002.
Cuarón was more interested in digging into the concept of Children of Men than he was in making a faithful adaptation of the novel. He only read the beginning of the existing script before setting it aside because he didn’t like it. He wasn’t interested in making this a science fiction movie. And he wasn’t interested in the upper class drama that had been present in the novel. He wanted to make a movie that reflected the state of the world at the time. Which was quite tumultuous and frightening. This was in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, during the build-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some would start imagining something like Blade Runner when thinking of the futuristic setting. But Cuarón envisioned a future that looked a lot like modern day. Just more rundown and dangerous. The only reason to set the story in the future was because it needed to take place a substantial amount of time after humanity became infertile. And the idea of infertility could be used as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope Cuarón felt humanity had in the early two thousands.
Once he had been presented with the premise of Children of Men, he had a take on the story so clear in his mind that he was afraid to read the novel. He was concerned that reading James’ version of the story would confuse his vision of it. So he only read an abridged version of the novel, while Sexton read the complete text. Then they cherrypicked the elements they felt were relevant to their approach to the idea.
The version of Children of Men that Cuarón and Sexton crafted together moves the setting to 2027. Eighteen years have passed since the last live human birth – and the youngest person on the planet has just been murdered. Knifed outside a bar for refusing to give an autograph. The world is falling apart. Crime, terrorism, paranoia, cities under siege. England has had its borders closed for eight years. Illegal immigrants are regularly captured and deported. The lead character is an office worker named Theo Faron, a depressed alcoholic whose only child died in the flu epidemic of 2008. Theo and his wife Julian broke up after the death of their son… But as the story begins, Theo is brought back into contact with Julian, who is now a member of a dissident group called the Fishes. The group needs help securing transit papers for an immigrant girl named Kee. And since Theo’s cousin works with the government saving pieces of art from around the world, he can get those papers easily. Theo does get the transit papers, but there’s a catch: they’re joint transit papers. He has to travel with the girl. Their journey is just getting started when Theo, Kee, and the Fishes are attacked and Julian is murdered. Theo is ready to give up and move on. Then Kee reveals that she is pregnant. The first human female to get pregnant in a long time. That’s when Theo becomes invested in making sure Kee is kept safe.
Since Kee is an immigrant, the fear is that the government would take her baby and pass it off as the child of a posh British couple. And Kee would be silenced forever. So the plan is to get her to the coast, where Julian arranged for her to be picked up by a ship belonging to the Human Project. An organization that is said to have research facilities set up in secret locations. And a safe haven community in the Azores. A lot of people don’t believe the Human Project even exists. Theo is skeptical himself. Kee and midwife Miriam can’t confirm they’re real, because Julian is the only one in contact with them. But the Human Project is Kee’s one chance to be kept safe. So Theo, Kee, and Miriam make their way to the coast, fuelled only by hope. It’s a very dangerous journey that takes them through the awful conditions of a refugee camp. That then turns into a war zone. There’s a lot of death and despair along the way. But they have to keep holding on to the hope that there’s going to be reward for all this risk.
Beacon and other production companies behind Children of Men had deals with Universal. But when Cuarón and Sexton’s script was turned in to the studio, it was not received with great enthusiasm. It was too dark, bleak, and political. It wasn’t the sort of commercial sci-fi action movie a studio would hope for. And just when it became clear that Universal wasn’t going to be giving the project a greenlight, Cuarón got a huge offer. Warner Bros. asked him to direct the third Harry Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban. He took the job, and the producers of Children of Men thought that would be the end of his involvement with their film. Spy Game screenwriter David Arata was brought in to polish the script just so there would be some indication of life in the project. But the situation wasn’t as dire as the producers feared. Making The Prisoner of Azkaban required Cuarón to spend a lot of time in England – and during that time, he couldn’t get Children of Men out of his mind. As soon as the Harry Potter movie went into post-production, he called the Children of Men producers to let them know he wanted to do their movie next. And now that he had Harry Potter cred, Universal was suddenly interested in greenlighting his passion project.
Once The Prisoner of Azkaban was released in May of 2004, Cuarón was able to turn his focus to getting Children of Men into production. During the casting process, the director was informed that Universal wanted a big name to be cast as Theo Faron. Russell Crowe, George Clooney, and Matt Damon were on the list. Cuarón was pleasantly surprised to see that another one of the names on Universal’s list was Clive Owen. An actor who had a lot of buzz around him at the time due to his roles in the likes of Croupier, BMW’s The Hire shorts, and Sin City. Since Pierce Brosnan was being replaced as James Bond, a lot of fans were hoping Owen would be the new Double-O-Seven. But that wasn’t to be; the announcement that Daniel Craig was the new Bond came soon after Owen signed on for Children of Men. Cuarón cast Owen because when they met, he found that the actor really understood the character of Theo. He knew that Theo is not a highly capable, invincible hero. He’s certainly no James Bond. He’s just a regular, messed up guy. Owen had such great insight on the characters and story, Cuarón and Sexton even asked him to work on the script with them.
Then a supporting cast was built around Owen. Julianne Moore was cast as his dissident ex-wife Julian. The role of Theo’s pot-smoking artist friend Jasper went to Michael Caine. Philippa Urquhart plays Jasper’s wife Janice, a former journalist who was tortured by MI5 for criticizing the government. Danny Huston plays Nigel, Theo’s cousin who provides the transit papers. And has dedicated himself to saving works of art that, as far as he knows, nobody will even be around to see in a hundred years. Oana Pellea was cast to play Marichka, an immigrant woman who makes a strong impression even though none of the other characters understand her language. Peter Mullan was given the memorable role of Syd, an immigration officer who refers to himself in the third person and buys weed from Jasper. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Charlie Hunnam were cast as Luke and Patric, dissidents who have a different idea on how to handle the pregnant woman. At first, Luke appears to be an ally to Theo, Julian, and Kee. But it’s soon revealed that he’s the villain of the film. Pam Ferris plays Miriam, the midwife who accompanies Theo and the pregnant woman on their journey. And as the pregnant woman herself, Kee, Cuarón cast Clare-Hope Ashitey.
A casting announcement at the time mistakenly said Julianne Moore would be playing the pregnant character. That was an easy mistake to make, because Julian was the pregnant one in the novel. But Cuarón and his collaborators decided to switch things up, and chose to make the pregnant woman an immigrant from Africa. A nod to the theory that Homo sapiens originally developed in Africa and then migrated out across the world. Humanity began in Africa, and now it will continue because of an African woman.
REVIEW: Cuarón brought his go-to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki onto Children of Men with him. And together they were able to bring his vision of the story to the screen with incredible style. The idea was to give the film a sort of documentary feel. These events are happening and the camera just happens to be present to capture the moment. The director and cinematographer didn’t want to favor the characters over the environments they were in. They didn’t want to punch in for close-ups. They wanted to show the people existing in the midst of their surroundings. Due to this approach, the film has much longer shots than the average movie being made these days. While the average shot length in Hollywood films is in the range of four to six seconds, Children of Men has sixty-two shots that go on for more than twenty-two seconds. And when a fan cut together only the shots that last forty-five seconds or more, their video was thirty-one minutes long. The film has a running time of one hundred and nine minutes, so that’s a substantial amount of it being presented in long takes.
There are three especially long takes in the movie. Standout sequences that really stick with you after you’ve watched it. The first is a four minute sequence that takes place inside a car as it’s being attacked by people outside. A special rotating camera rig was designed to capture the moment, and the vehicle itself also had to be modified. The windshield could tilt out of the way of the camera. The seats could lower and tilt the actors out of the way. During the sequence, people get shot. The windshield shatters. A motorcycle chases the car and crashes. All of this is shown in one long take, there are no cuts. No insert shots. Of course, there was a lot of digital trickery done to make this all possible. Several elements in the sequence are CGI effects. And it’s not really just one long take. The sequence was shot in six takes in four different locations. But on the screen, it’s seamless.
Even more impressive than the car scene is a sequence that takes place in the refugee camp once war has broken out in there. Kee has been captured by Luke and taken into a crumbling building. With bullets flying everywhere and explosions going off around him, Theo has to make his way through the streets of the camp city. Then into the building, where he searches for Kee as bullets come through the walls. There is a shot in this sequence that goes on for around seven minutes. The camera follows Theo as he makes his way through this dangerous situation, with people dying all around him. It’s reminiscent of the most harrowing moments in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It took the crew fourteen days to prepare for the long take in this sequence. Every time it had to be re-shot, it took five hours to get everything set up again. At one point, blood from an unlucky bystander splashes across the camera lens. When he saw the blood hit the camera, Cuarón tried to call cut. Luckily, his voice was drowned out by the sounds of war on the set, so the camera kept rolling. Lubezki then convinced him that the take with blood on the lens should be used in the film. And it is in there. That blood remains in our view for quite a while. Just like the car scene, the long take in the war zone contains hidden cuts, but that doesn’t take away any of its effectiveness.
The war zone sequence is made all the more intense by the fact that Kee has given birth to her baby by that point. The characters now have to carry a newborn infant through this hellish environment. The birth of the baby is another scene that is presented in a long take. That one goes on for over three minutes. And it’s another one that features some stunningly convincing special effects. Kee’s lower body in the birth scene is fake, and the crew pushed a prop baby through this fake body. The prop baby was then replaced by a realistic CGI baby in post-production.
The long takes in Children of Men provide jaw-dropping moments. But the film is also impressive around those moments. Cuarón’s chilling vision of the future is fully believable, and it’s almost a shame that we hear any specific dates mentioned. Because if we weren’t already past the date given for when humanity became infertile, we could still see this a potential future. In 2021, it’s just as likely that we might have a world like this ahead of us as it was when the film was released in 2006.
The director didn’t want to fill his movie with exposition that would tell us what’s going on in 2027 or how the world got that way. We get all the information we need to understand the situation through interactions between characters who have no control over what’s going on. We can fill in the blanks on the state of the world by looking at the set design. Newspaper articles, TV screens, billboards, signs. Cuarón didn’t want to explain why humans became infertile because such an explanation would take up too much time. And would take the film too far into the realm of science fiction. The most detail we get on the situation comes from Miriam, who tells an emotional story about what it was like to be working as a nurse when the infertility issue began. It started with an epidemic of miscarriages. And then no more babies were being conceived.
Cuarón told Hollywood Elsewhere, “I was not interested in constructing a back-story about what caused female infertility. Because if I did that, a lot of the movie would then have to be about that. For me, female infertility was basically a metaphor for the fading sense of hope. And the Human Project… if I have to explain who they are and the whole background of that, that also would have consumed a significant portion. The Human Project is a metaphor for human understanding. For me that was sufficient.”
There’s also no explanation given for why Kee is the first woman to get pregnant in almost twenty years. It just happened. Cuarón does have fun playing with the nativity element of the situation. Kee is in a manger when she lets Theo know she’s pregnant. When characters see that she’s pregnant, or see the baby once it’s born, they react like it’s a religious event. Some even exclaim “Jesus Christ!” Beyond the nativity, there are visual nods to imagery that have become part of the human consciousness. A shot of a woman in the refugee camp crying over the corpse of her son is a reference to a photograph taken in the Balkans. A photo that also reminded Cuarón of the Michelangelo sculpture La Pieta, showing Mary holding the body of Jesus. Shots in the refugee camp bring to mind imagery of concentration camps. These shots are accompanied by a song that shares its title with a phrase that was at the entrance of most German concentration camps. Arbeit Macht Frei, meaning “work sets you free”. There’s also a visual reference to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. And if you’re wondering why there’s a pig balloon floating above Nigel’s place at the Battersea Power Station: that’s a nod to the cover of the Pink Floyd album Animals.
One moment in the film that reflected real world tragedy wasn’t originally meant to be so familiar. In the opening scene, a terrorist bomb blows apart a coffee shop on Fleet Street right after Theo has walked out of the place. That explosion was filmed in London just a month and a half after the city was hit by four terrorist bombings that targeted the public transport system. Fifty-six people were killed in those attacks and hundreds were injured. But the authorities still let Cuarón go through with filming the terrorist bombing scene. Which had already been planned, approved, and scheduled before the real bombing attacks happened.
So Children of Men is set in the future, but also very topical. And beyond the dazzling technical achievements, it also features terrific performances from its actors. Michael Caine is, of course, a standout as Jasper, who is quite different from the average Caine role. So different, in fact, that his wife didn’t even recognize him once he was in character. Caine decided to play Jasper like an older version of his late friend John Lennon. Some viewers may be surprised at how little screen time Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Charlie Hunnam have. The lesser known Clare-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris are around longer than the bigger names, and we come to like and care about their characters during the time we spend with them. Aside from one brief, heartbreaking moment with Jasper and his wife Janice, we’re with Theo for the entire movie. The camera either stays with him, or shows us his perspective. Along the way he proves to be a good hero, although his heroism at first seems unlikely. He’s just an unusual hero who loses his shoes early on and gets stuck wearing flip-flops for most of the movie. Speaking with the BBC, Owen described his character as “very undynamic, very reserved, and almost like a shadow of a human being. He is a guy who has given up and who is desperately sad about the world in which he lives. Through the course of the movie, his hope is reawakened. … It was very deliberate of Alfonso Cuarón to get away from any sense of a cliched, heroic character. I’m there trying to help this girl, and Alfonso didn’t want it to suddenly have the ‘Here we go, we’ve seen this before, this is where the main character saves the day’ feeling. By putting Theo in flip-flops and making him look like a complete alcoholic, out-of-shape mess, he avoided that.”
Theo is such an unusual hero that he never uses a gun in the movie. Not even when he’s making his way through a war zone. You might expect him to take a weapon from one of the corpses around him and start blasting away. But he never attempts to do so. He doesn’t even touch a gun.
LEGACY/NOW: Children of Men has some great action sequences in it, but it also has an arthouse sensibility. So it’s no surprise that the studio had no idea how to market a movie that was exciting but also bleak and political. When Universal gave it the greenlight, Stacey Snider was the head of the studio. But by the time filming was finished, Snider had left Universal for DreamWorks. There were new executives in place, and they were baffled by the film Cuarón handed over to them. They put together some unappealing posters. They cut together a flashy-but-underwhelming trailer that went heavy on exposition. And they sent the movie out into the world – where it was met with a shrug at the box office. Made on a budget of seventy-point-five million, Children of Men earned just thirty-five million at the North American box office. The international box office boosted it to a total of seventy million. It was considered a flop. But it did receive strong positive reactions from critics. Some critics listed it as the best film of the year, while more than twenty had it in their top ten.
Looking back, Children of Men feels like it should have been a Best Picture contender. But while it did receive some recognition from the Academy, it wasn’t nominated in that category. It was nominated for Best Achievement in Cinematography, Best Achievement in Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost to Pan’s Labyrinth in the cinematography category and to The Departed in the other two. But while it didn’t win an Oscar, it has gotten other accolades. When Film Comment polled critics to ask what the best films of the year were, Children of Men was number nineteen. Surprisingly, it did even better with Film Comment readers, who ranked it as the second best movie of 2006. Entertainment Weekly would go on to rank it as the seventh best film of the decade. When the BBC polled critics to find out what the best films of the twenty-first century have been, Children of Men came in at number thirteen. And in 2017, Rolling Stone magazine named it the best sci-fi film of this century. Even though its director doesn’t consider it to be a sci-fi film.
Perhaps the most surprising positive response came from author P.D. James. The film is so different from her novel, it would have been understandable if she wasn’t happy with it. But she kindly sent a statement to Cuarón saying she was pleased with the film. She admired what he did with the concept and was very proud to be associated with it.
Children of Men wasn’t seen by as many movie-goers as it should have been. And it’s still underseen. But it has gathered a strong cult following, and today there are many fans who consider it to be a classic. All this time later, it still feels relevant. And, unfortunately, the future is depicts still feels possible. It’s a hidden gem, and hopefully movie fans will continue to discover it for a long time to come.
When asked what he hoped the reaction from audiences would be, Cuarón told Filmmaker magazine, “I hope young people will see this film. I mean my generation, we blew it. I think we grew up in a world that was pre-idyllic, and we saw the world collapse in front of us. We tried to believe that it was not our fault, that it was not our responsibility. We felt powerless about the situations as if they were very overwhelming and there’s a certain sense of guilt involved in the whole thing. Younger generations, they were born in a world that went to shit already, so they have a completely different perspective of what’s going on. I really believe in the evolution of human understanding that’s happening in the younger generation and the generation to come. My intention was to take the viewer on a road trip through the state of things. Then once you go through this journey, try to come up with your own conclusions about the possibility of hope in a world like this. At the end I cannot dictate a sense of hope for anybody because a sense of hope is something that’s very internal. We wanted the end to be a glimpse of a possibility of hope, for the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you’re a hopeful person you’ll see a lot of hope, and if you’re a bleak person you’ll see complete hopelessness at the end.”
So seek out Children of Men. Go on this incredible journey through Cuarón’s vision of a potential future. And then see for yourself what you find in the end. Is it bleak, or do you have hope for the future?
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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