Tales From Development Hell

I used to be a much more voracious reader when I was younger, especially of genre material, so I became intimately acquainted with the Young Adult, or YA category of books that you usually read in junior high, and which is currently Hollywood's favorite place to turn to in search of new film franchises. After the success of "Harry Potter," "Twilight," and "Hunger Games," it seems like every YA novel of any popularity is under consideration for the feature treatment. However, a word of warning to young fans: the vast majority of the projects that are announced will never make it to the big screen, and will stay stuck in development hell. I've spent years tracking potential films based on various books that I liked as a kid or teenager, that ultimately amounted to very little. A few related cases below.

"Maniac Magee" - I learned about this one in the Disney Adventures magazine, of all places, way back in the early 90s when I was just hitting junior high and not supposed to be reading Disney Adventures magazine. The promise of a "Maniac" movie came with a cute little anecdote about how cute little child actor Elijah Wood had read the Newberry Award winning book and liked it so much, he offered to play the role of Maniac if Disney would make a movie version. Disney and Paramount did buy the rights, but never moved forward with the movie. However, I took the announcement face at face value and expected to see "Maniac Magee" in theaters in a year or so, and was already plotting ways to get the parents to take me to see it. For a couple of years afterwards, I was genuinely puzzled that it didn't emerge, and Elijah Wood kept showing up in other movies. Nickelodeon eventually made a television movie version of "Maniac Magee" in 2003, long after I had grown out of the target audience and stopped caring.

"The Sandman" - Right around the time the Internet became a real movie fan resource was also around the time I was in high school reading Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic book series and loving it. There was all kinds of chatter about an impending film version online, including full scripts that people were passing around the links to. This was really the first time I could track and follow the development of films as they were going on, so I was on top of every news item and every rumor about "The Sandman" movie. It never got out of the script stage, which was something it never quite occurred to me could happen. Surely if Warner Brothers was paying all these different writers, including Roger Avary, Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, to turn out all these different drafts, that meant they were fully intending to make the movie, right? Several of the scripts and descriptions of scripts remain online, but "The Sandman" is still stuck in development hell. Last I heard, Eric Kripke tried to turn it into a television show a few years back.

"The Last Unicorn" - After the success of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, there was a brief period when everyone thought that fantasy movies were making a comeback. One shiny new project that turned some heads was Continent Films' proposed adaptation of Peter S. Beagle's fantasy novel, "The Last Unicorn." You might be familiar with the 1982 animated feature, but this was going to be a live action production with all the trimmings. There were some clear warning signs that the would-be filmmakers were promising things they couldn't deliver, but I got caught up in the excitement anyway. They had an official website! And they had a script and a director and all these actors attached! Well, it turned out the involvement of all the talent was wishful thinking, and all the big and even not-so-big names were scrubbed from the website after a redesign in 2006. And it turns out the Continent Films has never actually produced anything. All they have are the rights to make a "Last Unicorn" movie, which thankfully will expire in 2014. Then hopefully someone else can take a real shot at it.

"The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle" - I was so sure this one was going to happen, and maybe it still might if we're lucky. Danny Devito is writing and directing the film, based on Avi's gripping maritime adventure novel I adored as a kid. Back in 2008 DeVito had a cast in place, featuring Saoirse Ronan, Pierce Brosnan, and Morgan Freeman, he had backers lined up, and he was spotted scouting for locations out on Lake Erie. But now one of his backers has sued him, Ronan's no longer attached, and the production has been moved to Ireland where it is supposed to start shooting next year. That said, there's still no news of who's replacing Ronan, there's no fixed start date, and we're coming up on ten years since Danny DeVito last directed a feature film. This has all the earmarks of a passion project gone terribly wrong. I'm still rooting for it, but I'm not going to be excited about "Charlotte Doyle" again until I see a real release date scheduled.

"The House of Stairs" - William Sleator was one of my favorite authors in junior high, because he wrote YA science fiction novels that were a little darker and headier than average. I always wondered why nobody ever tried to adapt his books, since they're right in the vein of what Hollywood has been hot for lately. And then yesterday I stumbled over an announcement from last November. My favorite of Sleator's works, "The House of Stairs," is supposed to be the inaugural film of the newly formed Canadian outfit, Zest Productions. They've hired a competent writer to tackle the script and director Martin Villeneuve, whose first film opens in October, is attached. However, Villenueve's next film is supposed to be whale tale "Aquarica," and there hasn't been a peep about the state of "House of Stairs" since the original announcement.

Oh boy. Here we go again.
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