[IMG:L]It’s been five minutes to midnight for a very, very long time — a development hell for superheroes
The original 12 Watchmen comic book issues (yes, it was a comic book well before it was a graphic novel) cleverly employed the visual motif of a doomsday clock slowly but increasingly awash with blood as the minutes to Armageddon ticked away. But when it came to bringing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark work to the big screen, those minutes turned to hours, days, years, and ultimately to decades.
Despite the film’s release in the wake of a pervasive trend of blockbuster superhero cinema such as Batman Begins,The Dark Knight, Iron Man and the Spider-Man and X-Men trilogies, Watchmen is far from just another attempt to translate another standard comic book property into movie form. The original work is its medium’s Ulysses, its War and Peace, the game-changer that in 1986, (along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, published that same year) propelled superhero storytelling – sometimes kicking and screaming – into a more sophisticated, artistically ambitious and decidedly literal direction. And while it seems the current trend of superhero films is ripe for a similar maturation, filmmakers have been trying to bring Watchmen’s dark and disturbing vision to life since the moment the first issue rocked the comic book world to its core.
“The movie was very hard to get made for several years – unfinancible [sic],” says producer Lawrence Gordon. “We had it set up to get made several times, and the studios pulled out.”
[IMG:R]Gordon, then serving as the president of 20th Century Fox and who was instrumental in bringing films like 48 Hrs, Predator, Die Hard and Field of Dreams to the screen, purchased the rights to Watchmen in August of 1986 – a month before the first issue debuted. Gordon worked with producer Joel Silver (riding high on Lethal Weapon and Die Hard) to develop the film, which got a boost in 1989 with the phenomenal success of the Tim Burton-directed first Batman film.
Screenwriter Sam Hamm, a comics fan who penned the Batman script, took a run at the screenplay, but even after extensive reworking he was ultimately stymied by the length and complexity of the source material. “The comic really is a spectacular piece of architecture,” Hamm told Entertainment Weekly, but “trying to replicate it [was] just impossible.”
The film was put in turnaround in 1991, and Gordon and Silver eventually moved the project to Warner Bros. (which shares a corporate parent with Watchmen’s publisher, DC Comics). Here visionary director and Monty Python stalwart Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) expressed great interest in it and brought on his frequent collaborator Charles McKeown to work on the script (as well as another Batman alum, Warren Skaaren), restoring many of Moore and Gibbons’ original elements.
Superstar names were bandied about to play the central characters – Robin Williams, Richard Gere and even Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan – but the filmmakers struggled with both financing and the screen story, which after almost a decade of development Gilliam ultimately pronounced “unfilmable [sic].”
[IMG:L]“The problem with Watchmen is that it requires about five hours to tell the story properly, and by reducing it to a two or two-and-a-half hour film, it seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about,” Gilliam said in 2000. “I was happy when I didn’t get the money to make it because I would have been embarrassed if we’d done it.”
By 2001 the project had migrated to Universal Studios – Silver had moved on, and Gordon contracted screenwriter David Hayter, hot off the success of the first X-Men film and a renewed Hollywood interest in comic book properties. Though Hayter first envisioned Watchmen as an HBO-style miniseries, that notion was financially unfeasible and – taking inspiration from Peter Jackson’s faithful book-to-screen accomplishments with Lord of the Rings, he instead crafted a screenplay for a feature film version, which even Moore – whose interest in seeing a film version had been initially skeptical and only further soured to the point of oft-proclaimed total disinterest – pronounced “as close as I could imagine anyone getting to Watchmen.”
“It was all about Alan Moore’s vision,” Hayter told Hollywood.com. “To me Watchmen was as close to a perfect story as you could get. I knew that the trap was to try to imprint your own ego on it, or try to ‘improve’ it, and that’s wasn’t the purpose of it. The entire purpose was to protect the original story and to present it as close to the graphic novel as possible.” The screenwriter had to fight constant battles with the studio over its suggested “improvements.” “It was relatively simple to adapt, but it was very difficult to protect along the way.” [PAGEBREAK]
[IMG:L]Creative clashes moved the project from Universal to Revolution Studios, with who Gordon and producer Lloyd Levin had success with in bringing Hellboy to the screen. But that was a brief transition and Watchmen subsequently landed at Paramount Pictures in 2004, where a director was finally attached: Darren Aronofsky, who’d established himself as a creative visualist with Requiem for a Dream and a comic book fan who’d been stymied in his prior attempt to adapt Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One to the screen (with Christian Bale attached as the lead).
Aronofsky eventually chose to pursue his passion project The Fountain instead, but Watchmen gained even more momentum when director Paul Greengrass, who had steered The Bourne Identity and its sequel to huge successes, signed on. Suddenly the film was entering a bona fide pre-production mode, targeted for a summer 2006 release after planned filming at England’s Pinewood Studios. Several stars were eyeing the project with great interest, including Joaquin Phoenix as Dr. Manhattan and Simon Pegg as Rorschach, with Daniel Craig, Jude Law and Sigourney Weaver also under consideration for roles. But a 2005 shakeup amongst Paramount’s executives left Watchmen in turnaround yet again. Sigh.
“We were fully crewed up, and had stages in London,” Gordon told Hollywood.com. “There was a change of regimes in the studio and the new regime couldn’t even get through the script.”
[IMG:R]Finally, the film found its way back to Warner Bros. in 2005, just as the studio was getting back into the superhero game following the dramatic box office returns for film properties from DC’s rival Marvel Comics. Warner was high on director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead), who’d created an unexpected blockbuster for the studio with 300, a stunning, visually inventive adaptation of the non-superheroic comic book series by Frank Miller. After two weeks of soul searching, Synder decided that if HE didn’t direct Watchmen, someone else would, and he set to work storyboarding and assembling a new script from two of Hayter’s drafts with screenwriter Alex Tse (with some uncredited polishes by Robero Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the scribes of Transformers and the forthcoming Star Trek film).
“My hope was to have the movie in some ways do what the book did to me,” Synder told Hollywood.com, “and what the book did to a lot of people who read it not knowing what it was and just thinking ‘It’s a comic book…These are characters I’m not totally familiar with but they’re going to go on the same types of adventures that I’m used to.’ That was the feeling I got that I expected from the book. And then, as you get into it, you realize that it’s something else.”
The alternate-1985 setting — which had been reluctantly swapped for a modern day setting by Hayter at studio behest — was restored, an R-rated approach was approved, and Snyder opted to use Hayter’s more streamlined ending, enlisting no less than Gibbons himself to draw the new ending in the same style as the original comics to give the director a near-authentic blueprint to work from. Moore remained aloof, however, critical of Snyder’s approach to 300 (words like “sublimely stupid” were uttered) and so adamantly disinterested in the effort after displeasure with prior Hollywood iterations of his works (V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and with DC Comics in general as to cheerfully sign over all film and licensing royalties to his colleague Gibbons.
[IMG:L]Additional comic book artists – Adam Hughes (Justice League, Ghost) and John Cassaday (Planetary, Astonishing X-Men) – were brought on to visualize slightly updated superhero costumes that would resonate with audiences now familiar with the superhero milieu. And while A-listers like Tom Cruise and Jude Law expressed interest in roles (both were considered for Ozymandias, though Cruise fancied Dr. Manhattan), the film ultimately went forward, shooting on sprawling, Gibbons-esque New York street set build on a Vancouver lumberyard with a cast of lesser-known but respected actors, including Oscar-nominated Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Patrick Wilson (Nite-Owl II), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), Carla Gugino (Silk Spectre I) and Matthew Goode (Ozymandias).
Of course, it wouldn’t be Watchmen if there weren’t one last little bit of nail-biting drama as the clock hand ticked closer to midnight. Twentieth Century Fox filed a copyright infringement suit in February 2008, claiming that it still held the rights to produce or at least distribute the film, while Warner Bros countered that Fox had failed to exercise its rights over subsequent incarnations of the project. As production on the film continued unencumbered, the two titans battled it out in court until a judge ruled in Fox’s favor at the end of the year, just months before the March 6, 2009 release date. Fox announced its intention to block the film’s release. Finally, a settlement was reached, with Fox giving up any future ownership of the film in exchange for millions in development and legal fees and a small percentage of the worldwide gross.
And finally, nearly 23 years after the first issue hit the stands and caught Hollywood’s eye, Watchmen is opening at a theater near you. Ask Lawrence Gordon, who’d been on the ride since the beginning, what the magic ingredient was that finally made this dream project a reality after so many false starts and he has a succinct and definitive answer.
“Zack Snyder, Zack Snyder, Zack Snyder,” said Gordon. “That’s what made the studio make the movie, in my opinion. They never would have made the movie otherwise.”
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