Let’s call it beach reading for film buffs. Joshua Hull’s Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made isn’t a work of fantasy (it’s not “what if Martin Scorsese had made The Godfather?”) but a glancing look at movies that got past the elevator pitch and onto someone’s drawing board. The light for these films was green—at least in someone’s eyes—and then the power was cut and the lights went out.
Some of Hull’s choices lived for years in “development hell,” Hollywood lingo for an idea trapped in meetings, rewrites, clashing egos and unreturned phone calls. Some of these films might still emerge in mutated form. Other selections never got past the ninth circle of hell. The PosterSpy web network provided each of the 50 with its own make-believe lobby poster.
Occasionally, there’s also a sideways glance into an additional non-film. The chapter on Neill Blomkamp’s Alien includes a sidebar on something far more interesting: William Gibson’s Alien 3, eventually turned into a graphic novel instead of a movie.
Among the more interesting chapters:
• Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2
Gladiator (2000) was the greatest sword-and-sandal blockbuster in many seasons and there’s nothing that spells sequel like a hit. Problem, the story’s hero (played by Russell Crowe) dies in the end. Undeterred, Crowe contacted fellow Australian Nick Cave (glad it wasn’t Baz Luhrman!) to untie the knotty problem. Cave wrote a metaphysical screenplay involving the perennial battlefield reincarnation of Crowe’s protagonist. Like the Flying Dutchman, he’s doomed to circle in time through eternity (the script ends in Vietnam). Said Cave: “I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made.”
• Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried
The legendary production was actually on its way to completion. Jerry Lewis directed, cowrote and starred in this bittersweet Holocaust comedy … or was it a Holocaust drama with comedic undertones? Lewis played a down-on-luck circus clown imprisoned in Nazi Germany for being politically incorrect. As Jews are hauled into his camp, he performs for the children to ease their anxiety. “Loss of innocence” is theme, along with the complicated morality of complicity. Tied up with “rights issues, and ongoing financial complications,” Lewis shelved the project and eventually donated his print to the Library of Congress with one stipulation: It can’t be shown until June 2024. Get ready.
• Stanley Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings
Actually, we could call it the Fab Four trilogy, given that The Beatles were behind the idea. They wanted to broaden their cinematic scope—to do something entirely different. Hearing that United Artists had purchased the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic got John Lennon to thinking … he could be cast as Gollum, Paul McCartney as Frodo, Ringo Starr as Samwise and—of course—George Harrison as Gandalf the Grey. They approached Kubrick who must have toyed with the idea long enough to pronounce Lord of the Rings as “unfilmable.” Minority opinion: I think he was right.
