DC's

* (restored)
Waiting for Godot (Roman Polanski)

Polanski proposed a film adaptation of the play to Beckett, who politely refused to allow it. Beckett insisted that the play was not cinematic material and that an adaptation would destroy it. He asked for Polanski’s forgiveness and that the director not dismiss him as a “purist bastard.”

 

 

Who Killed Bambi? (Russ Meyer, 1978)

Intended as a punk rock version of A Hard Day’s Night, the film was to star the Sex Pistols. It was to be based on a screenplay by Roger Ebert and Malcolm McClaren. According to Ebert, “McLaren claimed 20th Century-Fox read the screenplay and pulled the plug. This seems unlikely because the studio would not have green-lighted the film without reading the script. Meyer called me to say McLaren had made false promises of financing and was broke. The film’s fate was sealed when Princess Grace, a member of the Fox board, said, “We don’t want to make another Meyer X film.” Some footage was shot by Meyer, but not much, perhaps several days’ worth, and it wound up in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.

 

 

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Waters, 1980s)

Adaptation of the novel by John Kennedy Toole about a corpulent, flatulent medievalist. The role was considered for John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley, all of whom died before anything could be realized. Waters, who for a time had lived half a block from Toole’s mother (Thelma Ducoing), wanted the part for Divine before his death and pitched for the job of director, and lost it when the producer saw a photo of him, in his book Shock Value, visiting Manson Family member Charles ‘Tex’ Watson – who had killed one of the producer’s best friends.

 

 

CONFUSION. LECTURE BRUITÉE D’UN SCÉNARIO NON-RÉALISÉ DE JACQUES TATI

Confusion (Jacques Tati)

In a media-obsessed future Paris, society is glued to communication technology and little distinction is made between fiction and reality. Tati was planning to collaborate on the film with the band Sparks, who were to play two American TV execs. Action centers around the mishaps within the studio facilities of fictive media conglomerate COMM. During the live broadcast of a scripted drama filled with stagy theatrics, a mistakenly loaded gun kills an off-screen Monsieur Hulot. The cameras keep rolling, with cast members discreetly stepping over the fresh cadaver during their scenes, while the crew scrambles to remove it from sight.

 

 

King Shot (Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Co-produced by David Lynch, it was to star Asia Argento, Jeff Bridges, Marilyn Manson, and Udo Kier in a “metaphysical western set in a desert casino, featuring a man the size of King Kong and Marilyn Manson as a 300-year-old pope.” The film’s storyboards are available here.

 

 

Women (Paul Verhoeven)

To be adapted from Charles Bukowski’s fictionalized account of his experiences (and frequent dissatisfaction) with sex and romance.

 

 

The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling (David Miller, 1966)

‘This was my first film role, co-starring with Gregory Peck, who was a huge movie star at the time. He was not well-cast as an English army Colonel — he repeatedly addressed me as ‘Loo-tenant’: and when I repeatedly corrected his pronunciation (in UK we say ‘Left-tenant’), the director David Miller told me to shut up. ‘Never forget Ian, Great Britain is only 5% of the world market.'” The story was that a squad of British airmen attempt to smuggle plane parts into enemy territory with the aim of reassembling them and attacking German targets. It was a disaster. After five weeks filming, the summer was invaded by early snow which was forecast to persist through the following six months. The shooting was already behind schedule so Mirisch cut their losses by abandoning the film and sending us home — me with 4000 pounds.’ — Ian McKellen

 

 

To the White Sea (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)

The Coens wrote a nearly dialogue-free adaptation of James Dickey’s 1993 novel about a WWII American fighter pilot who, shot down on a mission over Tokyo in 1945, murders his way through the outskirts of the fire-bombed city. Brad Pitt was set to play the brutal protagonist, with Jeremy Thomas producing. The Coen Brothers’ decision to actually shoot the film in Japan proved to be the project’s downfall as it already had been a struggle for the Coens to convince 20th Century Fox to take this violent, experimental movie on.

 

 

 

 

Luchino Visconti in France in 1971 scouting locations for ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’

À la recherche du temps perdu (Luchino Visconti, 1969)

In 1969 Visconti commissioned a script by Suso Cecchi d’Amico. Visconti conducted rigorous research around Paris and the Normandy coast. The usual collaborators were retained: Nicole Stéphane (who owned the rights), photographer Claude Schwartz, costume designer Piero Tosi, and set designer Mario Garbuglia. Silvana Mangano was to play the Duchesse de Guermantes, Alain Delon or Dustin Hoffman the narrator-protagonist Marcel, and Helmut Berger the homosexual protégé of Baron Charlus, Charlie Morel. The proposed four-hour film boasted a huge cast and an accordingly huge budget for which financing could not be secured. Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando were considered for role of Charlus.

 

 

In a Dream of Passion (Monte Hellman)

Hellman’s adaptation of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, about an American’s experiences in a Hong Kong brothel, was to be produced by Roger Corman.

 

 

Batman-Dracula (Andy Warhol)

Thought to be the first campy portrayal of Batman, Andy Warhol directed the film without the permission of DC Comics and only showed it at his own exhibitions. Warhol’s friend, the appropriately named Gregory Battcock, played Batman, while Baby Jane Holtzer played Catwoman. While the film itself is unavailable, some scenes are shown in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Smith played Dracula.

 

 

A Scanner Darkly (Charlie Kaufman)

Kaufman said he wrote this script soon after Being John Malkovich: “I got it as an assignment. There was a director attached, an Australian woman named Emma(-Kate) Croghan. She had just directed an independent comedy [Strange Planet] and she was attached to the project by Jersey Films and then they brought me on.” And then the studio lost interest. Kaufman’s script is easy to find online, but Kaufman says you should just read the book instead. “What’s the point if you’re going to read the book? Certainly my version doesn’t offer anything that the book doesn’t! At the time, I felt like I was trying to do something that was respectful of the Dick book. I felt like the movies coming out based on his books had nothing to do with his books.”

 

 

Technically Sweet (Michelangelo Antonioni)

The director worked on this screenplay in the late Sixties and envisioned Jack Nicholson in the lead role as a man lost in the Amazon wilderness after surviving a plane crash. Some production stills from the unrealized film are available here.

 

 

Suffer or Die (Michelangelo Antonioni)

Scripted by Tonino Guerra and Anthony Burgess, it was to star Debra Winger alongside Mick Jagger or Richard Gere or Giancarlo Giannini as an architect. Amy Irving was cast at one point as a Catholic novice.

 

 

Freud (John Huston/Jean-Paul Sartre)

In 1958, legendary director John Huston decided to make a film about the life of Sigmund Freud. Having met Jean-Paul Sarte in 1952 during the filming of Moulin Rouge, Huston felt the philosopher would be the ideal person to script the Freud film, since Sartre knew Freud’s work so well and since Huston surmised that he would have “an objective and logical approach.” Ironically both Sartre and Huston considered themselves anti-Freud for largely the same reason: Sartre because as a Communist he believed the role of the psychoanalyst was limited and of little social importance. For his part Huston felt that psychoanalysis was an indulgence for bored house wives and the problem children of the rich while the “movers and shakers”’ were too busy for it and those that most needed it couldn’t afford it. First, Sartre delivered a modest 95-page treatment. This, however, became a 300-page draft in 1959 that Huston calculated would produce an unacceptable five-hour-long film. When Huston and Sartre met in person in Galway to find a way to cut the screenplay down to a reasonable length, their working relationship was less than cordial. In Huston’s recollection, Sartre was “as ugly as a human being can be.” Sartre’s remembrance is hardly more flattering of Huston: “…in moments of childish vanity, when he puts on a red dinner jacket or rides a horse (not very well) or counts his paintings or tells workmen what to do. Impossible to hold his attention five minutes: he can no longer work, he runs away from thinking.” After their Galway meeting, during which Huston tried and failed to hypnotize Sartre, the philosopher attempted another revision, but this time, he sent Huston an even longer draft, for an eight-hour film. At this point, Huston gave up on Sartre.

 

 

The Story (Jean-Luc Godard)

In the late 1970s Jean-Luc Godard became obsessed with the story of Siegel and planned to make a movie about him. He wrote a screenplay called, simply, “The Story”, and planned to cast Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton in the Siegel and Hill roles. He dropped this plan when Keaton lost interest and then turned his attention to Every Man for Himself (1980) as his return to commercial filmmaking.

 

 

Kaleidoscope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964-67)

After watching Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Hitchcock felt he was a century behind the Italians in technique. He asked the novelist Howard Fast to sketch a treatment about a gay, deformed serial killer. Pleased with the results, Hitchcock composed a shot list with over 450 camera positions and shot an hour’s worth of experimental color tests. MCA/Universal were disgusted by the script and immediately canceled the project, reducing Hitchcock to tears. See the images, parts of the script, and test footage.

 

 

Bunuel in Mexico researching A Sumptuous Ceremony

A Sumptuous Ceremony (Luis Buñuel)

At four o’clock one afternoon Luis Buñuel decided that he would make no more films. He was staying in the spa at San Jose Purua in southwest Mexico where, for more than twenty years, Buñuel had gone to write his scripts. It is a semitropical paradise set in a green canyon — a bit too hot, in truth, for Buñuel liked rain, fog, the north. The screenplay was for a film to be called A Sumptuous Ceremony, in homage to Andre Breton, who defined eroticism as “a sumptuous ceremony in an underground passage.” From the outset the watchwords were “terror” and “eroticism.” Bunuel imagined a young girl in a prison cell receiving a visit from a phantom bishop; a trap door led to an underground passageway and to a boat filled with explosives for blowing up the Louvre museum. The script was never finished. Buñuel had barely arrived in San Jose Purua when he felt unwell, ill at ease (this was 1979 and he was therefore seventy-nine years old). He spoke of some “menace,” and at four o’clock in the afternoon he announced that his life as a filmmaker was over.

 

 

The Conquest of Mexico (Werner Herzog)

Planning to take the perspective of the conquered Aztecs, Herzog said the film would be so expensive that it could only be made with the backing of a Hollywood studio. “I am currently working on a film about the conquest of Mexico and Francis Ford Coppola is involved,” Herzog said at the time. “But I am not making a Hollywood film. Somehow it will still be a Bavarian film. I have nothing against what they do in Hollywood. It doesn’t bother me. Let them do it.”

 

 

David Lynch storyboard for Ronnie Rocket

Ronnie Rocket (David Lynch)

A comedy starring a reanimated dead teen, set in a rundown, industrial future. Screenplay available here.

 

 

One Saliva Bubble (David Lynch, 1987)

An early project of Lynch and Mark Frost written almost a year before the Twin Peaks pilot. A saliva bubble from a country bumpkin working at a top-secret military base gets into a weapons system, causing the device to fire upon Newtonville, Kansas, and prompting the townsfolk to switch identities with one another. Lynch called it “an out-and-out wacko dumb comedy”; Martin Short and Steve Martin were initially attached to star. Screenplay is available here.

 

 

Heartbeat in the Brain (Amanda Feilding)

After shaving her hairline, donning a floral cap and constructing protective eyewear from a pair of sunglasses and medical tape, 27-year-old art student Amanda Feilding injects herself with an anesthetic, peels the skin from her forehead with a scalpel, and begins to drill into her own frontal bone with a foot operated dentist’s drill in this documentary/art piece about the “science” of trepanation. A reviewer who saw the film in 1978 reported that when Feilding finally drills through the bone and grins victoriously as blood spurts down her face, several members of the audience fainted, “dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums.” The film hasn’t been seen in 44 years. It is assumed that Feilding has a copy.

 

 

Pincushion (John Carpenter)

Postapocalyptic odyssey was to star Cher, whose character must deliver a life-saving serum to Salt Lake City. John Raffo scripted.

 

 

Hu-Man (Jérôme Laperrousaz)

An actor (Terence Stamp, playing himself) is placed in a series of dangerous situations, while his fear is broadcast to the television audience. Their emotional reactions will determine whether he is sent into the future, or the past. Directed by Jérôme Laperrousaz, a highly elusive figure whose other films include the almost equally obscure documentary Amougies (Music Power – European Music Revolution) and the Bob Marley-starring musical Third World, and co-starring Jeanne Moreau, Hu-Man won the Trieste Festival of Science Fiction Films in 1976, but has fallen into obscurity, and apparently no prints exist.

 

 

L’Ailleurs immédiat (Jean-Pierre Gorin)

In the director’s first solo film, Gorin played the lead, reciting passages from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals while getting tattooed, and masturbating on a Paris window ledge. The film was reportedly destroyed by the producers before completion, after the drug arrest of the lead actress.

 

 

The Tourist (Claire Noto)

Noto’s script, started in 1980, has often been cited as similar to Blade Runner, and its moody, atmospheric, and unexpectedly sexual overtones also suggested the alienation and tragic nature of The Hunger and the exotic mien of the creatures from Ridley Scott’s Alien. It languished in development hell forever, while its ideas proved so popular that it was plundered time and again, most blatantly by Men In Black which mostly lifted the concept wholesale, added heroic human agents as the leads, jettisoned the existential woe of estranged aliens, trapped and in-hiding on Earth, and of course made it a comedy. Legendary visualist H. R. Giger created a series of alien designs in the early 1980s and they, like the script, were much too sexualized and unsettling for the execs who were trying to grapple with an unwieldy story of morality, corruption, xenophobia, humanity and imprisonment, both physical and psychological. Citing influences such as Fellini and Antonioni, Noto once said of the screenplay “I wanted to portray sexual agony and ecstasy in a way I’d never seen before, and science fiction seemed like the arena.” But in development hell she remained, though briefly flirting with Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, before they went broke (legal problems began here, as another producer claimed she co-owned the option). Noto’s difficult nature saw her kicked off her own creation, which then spent years in the studio system (Universal, WB, Paramount, Joel Silver all being involved) as it was overdeveloped into something less nihilistic and more homogenized. And also, bland. In the end, it was a dark independent movie that should have stayed that way. Unfortunately, the Fox Searchlights of the world didn’t exist yet, thus the only option for the project was the studio world where it just didn’t fit. HR Giger’s conceptual drawings for the film are available here.

 

 

The Corrections (Noah Baumbach, 2012)

Scott Rudin was to produce this HBO miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel. Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Maggie Gyllnehaal, Greta Gerwig, and Rhys Ifans were cast and shooting began before HBO cancelled the project. According to Baumbach, “We shot a pilot, but we didn’t shoot a whole pilot, even. It was never finished.”

 

 

Napoleon (Stanley Kubrick, 1969-70)

A biopic on Napoleon set to be made just after the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was so enthusiastic to make the project that he confessed to identifying with Bonaparte down to the way he ate his food. Jack Nicholson was slated to play the title character, but when corporate changes hit MGM, Kubrick lost the approval.

 

 

The Lord of the Rings (Stanley Kubrick)

In the late 1960s, The Beatles worked for a year on a project in which they would star in an adaptation of Tolkien’s novel. The plan was that Paul McCartney would play Frodo Baggins with Ringo Starr backing him up in the role of Sam Gamgee. George Harrison would don a hat and grow his beard a little longer to take on the role of Gandalf and John Lennon decided that for him only the role of Gollum would do. They even went as far as to Stanley Kubrick to direct the film. Kubrick did consider it, citing the sheer immensity of the book as a reason for his declining The Beatles’ offer. The project finally died due to the increasing animosity between band members.

 

 

The Moviegoer (Terrence Malick)

Adaptation of Walker Percy’s novel about a Korean War vet turned stockbroker whose traumatic experiences cause him to search for life’s deeper meaning, heading for New Orleans. Malick abandoned the idea after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, where the film was to take place.

 

 

The English Speaker (Terrence Malick)

This highly personal passion project was based on the pioneering study by “talking cure” proponent and Freud forerunner Josef Breuer of 1880s psychoanalysis patient Anna O, a hysteric given to melancholia, personality changes and a form of aphasia in which she could understand only German, but replied in English, French or Italian. The screenplay, according to producer Bobby Geisler, one of the very few people ever allowed to read it, was “as if [Malick] had ripped open his heart and bled his true feelings onto the page,” while author Peter Biskind described it as “The Exorcist as written by Dostoevsky.” But perhaps because he felt so passionately, the project got sucked into the whirl of controversy and recrimination that surrounded the tortuous process of getting The Thin Red Line to screens. Malick in fact held the finishing of his war elegy for ransom, demanding in perpetuity rights over The English Speaker to ensure no one but him could direct it. The producers held out, though, and in the dust cloud thrown up by the eventual breakdown of the relationship between Malick, Geisler, and The Thin Red Line producer Mike Medavoy, it’s hard to see exactly where the rights landed.

 

 

Mona Lisa (Larry Clark)

Remake of Neil Jordan’s 1986 underworld thriller to star Eva Green and Mickey Rourke, or Rosario Dawson and Hayden Christensen.

 

 

Maldoror (Alberto Cavallone)

This is a holy grail amongst film collectors, matched only by The Day the Clown Cried. There was no one more qualified to adapt Comte de Lautréamont’s infamous novel than director Alberto Cavallone, who made a number of grotesque/erotic art films, which were in vogue at the time. Cavallone’s adaptation was completed, though never publically screened, making the film as impenetrable as its source material. Finding a copy would be, in the words of the Comte himself, as “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” A detailed account of the film’s history by Mike Kitchell is available here.

 

 

La Belle vie (Robert Bresson)

Bresson received “advance-on-box-office” French funding in 1986 for the project.

 

 

Genesis (Robert Bresson, 1963)

A lavish adaptation of the Book of Genesis that Bresson wanted and tried to make off and on for 35 years. The story would have had to span the creation of the universe all the way to the building of the Tower of Babel. And back in the day, Bresson didn’t have Terrence Malick’s VFX team for “The Tree of Life.” Dino De Laurentiis had agreed to finance, but Bresson abandoned the project only to take it up again and then abandon it a second time. He once said that one of the frustrations with the production was that he couldn’t make his animal performers do as they were told. He would try to mount the project one more time in 1985, thanks to “an exceptional pre-production grant” he had received, but this attempt failed too.

 

 

Gershwin (Martin Scorsese, 1981)

Paul Schrader and John Guare wrote drafts of the script for this biopic about the American composer George Gershwin. Lavish production numbers of Gershwin’s works were to be related to scenes from his life as discussed by Gershwin on a psychologist’s couch. The movie was owed to Warner Bros., but they were eventually interested in another Scorsese picture (they also were skeptical about the cost/return prospects on “Gershwin”). “Ultimately, when it was time to do Gershwin, they turned to me and said, ‘We’d rather have one on Dean Martin,’ ” Scorsese said circa 2004. The problem was, while Tom Hanks was eyed for the lead of Dino (Martin’s birth name), and Nick Pileggi (the author and screenwriter of Goodfellas and Casino) was going to write the script, that one wasn’t even started, while Gershwin was ready to roll. WB wouldn’t budge. The project was finally canceled for good due to complications with rights and the fear that a young audience would not understand or care about Gershwin.

 

 

Frankenstein (David Cronenberg)

Canadian film producer Pierre David approached Cronenberg in the ’80s with the idea and the filmmaker offhandedly said yes. “He said, ‘Listen, tell me what you think… David Cronenberg’s Frankenstein?” Cronenberg recalled of the producer’s pitch. He replied “Sounds good to me. What about poor Mary Shelley?” And the next thing Cronenberg knew, there was a full-page ad in Variety touting, “David Cronenberg’s Frankenstein.” Evidently, Cronenberg did think about it a little bit. “It would be a more rethinking than a remake. For one thing I’d try to retain Shelley’s original concept of the creature being an intelligent, sensitive man. Not just a beast,” he is quoted as saying in the collection of interviews Cronenberg on Cronenberg, but, beyond that nothing seemed to happen.

 

 

Master of Lies (Nicolas Roeg)

This modern-day Jekyll-and-Hyde story was to star Donald Sutherland as a celebrated author who suffers from attacks of blindness. A story of parallel protagonists in which one man’s destructive fascination for another masks his desire to become him. Jamie Sives and Shirley Henderson were to co-star, with Eddie Dick producing.

 

 

Dumbo 2 (Walt Disney Studios)

Dumbo 2 was to be a direct-to-video sequel. It would of taken place a day or so after Dumbo ended. Now that Dumbo isn’t considered a freak (as he’s bringing in major bank for the circus) he’s made a group of super cool and hip friends. The premise: Dumbo and his circus buddies have to figure their way out of the big city after the circus train accidentally leaves them there. When John Lasseter became the Creative Director for Disney, he put a stop to all Disney sequels. Because instead of introducing children to the classics like intended, the sequels often tarnished the spirit of the original films. And it’s not surprising that Lasseter wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to his favorite film. The sequel was so far along that a “behind the scenes” trailer was actually released.

 

 

Maldoror (Kenneth Anger, 1952)

A film based on the work of proto-surrealist poet Comte de Lautréamont. Production never went past test footage and rehearsals with ballet dancers for the film from the companies of Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and the Ballets de Paris of Roland Petit. The footage and information about the film are lost.

 

 

Spike Jonze Harold & The Purple Crayon Test Film

Harold and The Purple Crayon (Spike Jonze)

The film was an adaptation of an adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s novel Harold & The Purple Crayon. Jonze worked on the movie for a year and half, but said by that time the vision of the movie had veered off course from its original aims, due to studio notes and interference. “I wanted it to be almost like this silent animation, going back and forth between live action and animation,” he said, but after 18 months it had transformed into something else. “When we finally got the plug pulled I got this amazing sense of relief.” Jonze and his team took a giant 6-foot Purple Crayon replica that was made during development and pitched it off a six story roof in downtown Los Angeles in an anti-form of celebration. “We watched it shatter and I was just so relieved. And I realized over the course of a year and a half, I’d let the studio anxiety—’It’s gotta be funny,’ ‘It’s gotta have snappier dialogue,’ ‘This is too sad,’ ‘This is too melancholy’— and it happened millimeter by millimeter. A year and a half later.

 

 

The Idiot (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)

Throughout the 1970s, Tarkovsky tried and failed to make a film version of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. According to Tarkovsky’s younger sister, Marina Tarkovskaya, adapting the novel was a lifelong dream and the state-funded and controlled Russian government (who had to approve all such movies) would never let him make it and kept stringing him along. “Andrei dreamed about filming [it], but they casually told him: ‘You are too young and inexperienced. Let some time pass!,” she told the Voice Of Russia in 2012. “In the end, they kept feeding him with promises for 10 years, and that cherished dream of his life was never realized. Let me stress that Andrei was never a dissident, but the leaders of the USSR still perceived him as a stranger, a person with internal freedom, that was what they could not forgive.” An August 1983 letter from a Russian Deputy Chairman, confirms that Tarkovsky had signed a contract to write an Idiot screenplay for Russian film studio Mosfilm, but in an 1984 Italian press conference, Tarkovsky declared he would never return to the home country. He then passed away three years later at the age of 54.

 

 

Where the Wild Things Are (John Lasseter)

In 1983, future Pixar honcho and director John Lasseter directed a 30-second film test of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which Disney then owned the rights to and were planning to make into an animated film. Lasseter was asked to do an experiment to see if it would be feasible to hybridize hand-drawn character animation with 3D backgrounds. Studio heads decided the technique was “too expensive” and “what they do on Futurama,” and Lasseter was fired shortly after.

 

 

Cocaine (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

Fassbinder said of his flashback-centered film based on Pitigrilli’s 1921 novel: “Cocaine freezes the brain, freeing one’s thoughts of anything inessential, and thereby liberating the essential, the imagination, concentration, and so on. This freezing of the brain . . . will be expressed in the film as follows: everything visible will appear covered with a sort of hoarfrost, glittering ice, whether in winter or summer; glasses and windows will covered with ice flowers, and with all the interior shots in the studio, even in summertime, the actors’ breath will be visible, as is usually the case only when it’s bitter cold outside.” This film was supposed to be a big budget production. It had an announcement at the festival in Cannes in May 1982, which Fassbinder and the producer attended. The problem was that because Fassbinder’s script was so big (about 600 pages) the producer asked him to think about shortening it. Since Fassbinder wasn’t in the mood to cut it quickly, he proposed to shoot other films first. He died without ever going back to it.

 

 

Dracula (Ken Russell)

A “sex-propelled” comic script was written in 1978 as a star vehicle for Mick Fleetwood. The aesthetic was to draw on Aubrey Beardsley (an artist admired by this version of the Count, an arts philanthropist).

 

 

Giraffes on Horseback Salad (Salvador Dalí)

The screenplay was written for the Marx Brothers. It was never produced because MGM thought it would be too surreal for them. Harpo also did not find it funny enough for the group. The film’s storyline is available here.

 

 

Cleo (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Soderbergh envisioned a 3-D rock musical about Cleopatra with songs by Robert Pollard, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Ray Winstone was signed to play Julius Caesar, and Hugh Jackman was to play her lover. “It’s like an Elvis musical in a way,” Soderbergh said of it at the time. “It’s not serious. I mean it’s historically pretty accurate but it’s sort of like Viva Las Vegas meets Tommy.” As of late 2013, Soderbergh announced he was reimagining the project as a Broadway musical.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Hey. BB was a lucky, golden situation. It was an established literary center, already known. They had a bit of money to pay readers. LA was a literary backwater back then and bringing in somewhat known writers from elsewhere was a rarity and could cause a fuss. I was doing Little Caesar at the same time so I had connections with cool writers from elsewhere through that to invite. Stuff like that. politekid’s book still hasn’t arrived in my hands. I need to chase it. The heatwave is interfering with everything. Annoying why? ** Sam F, You’re in France. I hope you’re lucky enough to be out of the killing circle or dome or whatever of heat, but if you’re south … wow, borrow some snorkling gear. It’s a date on the future sharing of a very, very cold something. ** Carsten, I heard Germany won. There’s always tomorrow or whenever. Glad the Feneon penetrated. Please excuse this leakage from my boiled brain. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ah, drat for yesterday’s taxi mishap. But Friday is very nearby. ** Bill, Hi. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that book has appeared here before. I did read about that one-person-only film thing, yes. Highly intriguing, of course, even though Dafoe has become a bit of a chore to watch in things for me, even though he does still have mostly decent taste in projects. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, He is. Interesting. Nice and yahoo about the Korg. I can’t do rides that spin. I start vomiting in about 8 seconds. Well, of course I love dark rides maybe even more than roller coasters. Much more even. My all-time favorite amusement park ride is still ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride’ at Disneyland which formed the blueprint for pretty much every dark ride ever since. It’s a flawless masterpiece. There are lots of indoor roller coasters, but that one was the first? Even that seems unlikely. You brought your drum machine to a gig? Wow, that’s so cool I can barely think about it. I think/fear that serial killer attractions will probably remain the turf of home haunts and haunted houses. Theme parks are ultimately pretty chickenshit. ** HaRpEr //, Amazing! Now comes the necessary and most unfun part, but it has to be done. Michael Brown, the mastermind behind The Left Banke, was a minor genius. TLB was definitely his best work, but there are interesting things about his later ventures too. I did an old post about him that I should restore. ‘Hors Satan’ is great. Dumont’s earlier Bressonian films are mostly really, really good. I wish he’d go back to that style, which I think suits his talent or whatever much better, but he seems to be quite stubborn. ** laura w, Hi. Novels don’t get much better than ‘Castle Faggot’ if you ask me. I think you would be glad if you got the Feneon. I’m kind of a wreck from the neck up, but I’m soldiering through the worsening heat so far. Keep giving me reasons to stay awake. ** Laura, Until I find an igloo somewhere, I’ll trust you on that. Today you break free? Over here there’s nowhere to break free into. I’m already sweating at 8:01 am, but you can have a hug, although I warn you it will not help setting you free. I’m dealing by sitting as close to my shitty AC unit as I can. But I have a cafe date today so that’ll be a big test. Your favorite actor? Who precisely? Everyone, Mighty Laura made a ‘playlist meant to psyche me into writing the stuff, just in case it might match anyone else’s needs of late (didn’t specifically wanna torture yall for 19 hours, that’s just the number of the Zabaniyat guarding the gates of muslim hell lol)’. I’m going to try it. How about you? Here. Thanks, pal. ** Okay. Due to the listlessness caused by Paris’s current, murderous heatwave, and its crushing effect on my productivity, you’re going to get a few more restored posts this week than you normally do. And here’s one. See you tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

______________

 

‘Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) was a French anarchist, editor, and art critic in Paris during the late 1800’s. Born in Turin, he moved to Paris at the age of 20 to work for the Ministry of Defense. He attended the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, later coining the term “Neo-Impressionism” to define the movement led by Georges Seurat. He was the first French publisher to publish James Joyce. In 1892, the French police searched his apartment, claiming him to be an active anarchist. That summer, along with other intellectuals and artists, Fénéon was placed on trial, a case which is now know as The Trial of the Thirty. Although the charges were dismissed, he was discharged from the Ministry of Defense. Despite the discharge the police didn’t believe in Fénéon’s innocence. Once the prefect told Mme Fénéon who came to complain that the police continued shadowing her husband, “Madam, I’m sorry to say this, but you’ve married a killer.'”

‘Decades before the rise of “flash fiction,” Félix Fénéon mastered the art of flash nonfiction in the 1,220 short items he wrote for a Paris newspaper in 1906. Collected and published in book form after his death, Fénéon’s miniature masterpieces of irony and suspense are a tour de force of Pointillist prose. From adultery, murder, revenge, and traffic accidents to tax collection, labor unrest, suicides, and the occasional well-deserved celebration, daily life in France a century ago was as unexpectedly comic and tragic as anywhere else. But only a cultural figure as central yet self-effacing as Fénéon — quiet dandy and secret anarchist, champion of Seurat and first publisher of Lautréamont, translator of Poe and Jane Austen — could have transformed newspaper hackwork into a modernist mosaic that captures the particular details of a place and an age with such exquisite timing and humor. Novels in Three Lines not only anticipates literary “ready-mades” like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Andy Warhol’s a: a novel; it is a unique artifact from the golden age of the newspaper and a window into France in 1906 on the cusp of modernity.’ — from The Anarchist Encyclopedia

 

 

 

Scratching it with a hair-triggered revolver, Mr. Ed… B… removed the end of his nose, in the Vivienne police station.

 

Falling from a scaffolding at the same time as Mr. Dury, stone-mason, of Marseille, a stone crushed his skull.

 

Louis Lamarre had neither work nor lodging; but he did have a few coppers. he bought a quart of kerosene from a grocer in Saint Denis, and drank it.

 

A madwoman of Puechabon (Herault), Mrs. Bautiol, nee Herail, used a club to awaken her parents-in-law.

 

At finding her son Hyacinth, 69, hanged, Mrs. Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she couldn’t cut the rope.

 

In Essoyes (Aube), Bernard, 25, bludeoned Mr. Dufert, who is 89, and stabbed his wife. He was jealous.

 

In Brest, thanks to a smoker’s carelessness, Miss Ledru, all done up in tulle, was badly burned on thighs and breasts.

 

In Djiajelli, a thirteen-year-old virgin, propositioned by a lewd rake of ten, did him in with three knife-blows.

 

Scissors in hand, Marie le Goeffic was playing on a swing. So that, falling, she punctured her abdomen. In Bretonneau.

 

Not finding his daughter of 19 austere enough, the Saint-Etienne jeweler Jallat killed her. He still, it is true, has eleven other children.

 

“What! all those children perched on my wall?” With eight shots, Mr. Olive, a Toulon property-owner made them scramble down, covered with blood.

 

Marie Jandeau, a handsome girl well known to many gentlemen of Toulon, suffocated in her room last night, on purpose.

 

A Nancy dishwasher, Vital Frerotte, recently returned from Lourdes forever cured of tuberculosis, died, on Sunday, by mistake.

 

Miss Verbeau did manage to hit Marie Champion, in the breast, but she burned her own eye, for a bowl of vitriol is not an accurate weapon.

 

M. Jonnart denied to the commission that the new tax plan was a scheme to make the budget’s ends meet.

 

A criminal virago, Mlle Tulle, was sentenced by the Rouen court to 10 years’ hard labor, while her lover got five.

 

Because of his poster opposing the strikebreakers, the students of Brest lycee hissed their teacher, M. Litalien, an aide to the mayor.

 

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.

 

A complaint was sworn by the Persian physician Djai Khan against a compatriot who had stolen from him a tiara.

 

A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at the Madeleine have been arrested.

 

A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.

 

On Place du Pantheon, a heated group of voters attempted to roast an effigy of M. Auffray, the losing candidate. They were dispersed.

 

Arrested in Saint-Germain for petty theft, Joël Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens.

 

The photographer Joachim Berthoud could not get over the death of his wife. He killed himself in Fontanay-sous-Bois.

 

Reverend Andrieux, of Roannes, near Aurillac, whom a pitiless husband perforated Wednesday with two rifle shots, died last night.

 

In political disagreements, M. Begouen, journalist, and M. Bepmale, MP, had called one another “thief” and “liar.” They have reconciled.

 

In a café on Rue Fontaine, Vautour, Lenoir, and Atanis exchanged a few bullets regarding their wives, who were not present.

 

Women suckling their infants argued the workers’ cause to the director of the streetcar lines in Toulon. He was unmoved.

 

The Yodtzes, of Bezons, were somewhat burned in a fire from which they were rescued by two cuirassiers.

 

Ten years’ hard labor were given Tournour by the court in Nancy. The adolescent killed a traveler who employed him as guide.

 

No more briar pipes. Their makers, in Saint-Claude, have stopped work until they are paid better.

 

“If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,” M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.

 

A thunderstorm interrupted the celebration in Orléans in honor of Joan of Arc and the 477th anniversary of the defeat of the English.

 

In the course of a heated political discussion in Propriano, Corsica, two men were killed and two wounded.

 

In Bone, the courts and the bar have reestablished contact with the prison, now that the typhus outbreak there has been curbed.

 

Clash in the street between the municipal powers of Vendres, Herault, and the party of the opposition. Two constables were injured.

 

Despondent owing to the bankruptcy of one of his debtors, M. Arturo Ferretti, merchant of Bizerte, killed himself with a hunting rifle.

 

While thundering for the Republic, a 300-year-old cannon exploded in Chatou, but no one was hurt.

 

The charge of embezzlement against the management of the Toulon artillery amounts to nothing, according to the manager’s inquiry.

 

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

 

Mme Vivant, of Argenteuil, failed to reckon with the ardor of Maheu, the laundry’s owner. He fished the desperate laundress from the Seine.

 

Finding her son, Hyacinthe, 69, hanged, Mme Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she could not cut him down.

 

The fever, of military origin, that is raging in Rouillac, Charente, is getting worse and spreading. Preventative measures have been taken.

 

In the second arrondissement, 27 violations have been charged in three days against cabdrivers who demanded excessive tips up front.

 

Yesterday, in the streets of Paris, cars killed Mme Resche and M. P. Chaverrais and gravely wounded Mlle Fernande Tissedre.

 

At Toulouse, the finale of the bailliffs’ convention. Their duties, said a speaker, are “delicate, dangerous, and insufficiently compensated.”

 

Due to their ardor during audits and polls, some congregants and a voter have been sentenced, in Cholet and Saint-Girons.

 

The May Day celebration in Lorient was noisy, but not a hint of violence gave the slightest cause for police intervention.

 

During a scuffle in Grenoble, three demonstrators were arrested by the brigade, who were hissed by the crowd.

 

After finding a suspect device on his doorstep, Friquet, a printer in Aubusson, filed a complaint against persons unknown.

 

Sand and only that was the content of two suspect packages that yesterday morning alarmed Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

 

The recalled mayor of Montigny, his wife, and a member of the municipal council have been sentenced to prison for strike-related offenses.

 

D., of the 8th Colonial Regiment, Toulon, who incited inmates to riot in the correctional barracks, has been given 60 days in jail.

_______________

 

Felix Feneon, art critic

‘As soon as Félix Fénéon appeared at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, at which Seurat’s La Grande Jatte was shown, he immediately estimated the historical importance of the new art technique. The future generations will remember 1886, because the age of Manet and Impressionism had come to its logical end and the age of Neo-Impressionism began, stated Félix Fénéon.

‘Neo-Impressionism was the term, introduced by him to denote the new movement, it showed on one hand its connection with Impressionism, which experimented with light and color, and on the other hand denoted the new style with its ‘conscious and scientific’ approach towards the problems of color and light. The ‘bull confusion’, so Fénéon called the reaction of the public to the unusual technique of Seurat, Signac and other Pointillists.

‘Actually he was the only critic who “proved capable of articulating an appreciation of Seurat’s picture, and the new method of painting it exemplified, in words notable for their objective tone.” (Hajo Düchting. Seurat. The Master of Pointillism.) Félix Fénéon defined to the public the idea that stood behind the new techniques,

‘“If one looks at any uniformly shaded area in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, one can find on every centimeter of it a swirling swarm of small dots which contains all the elements which comprise the color desired. Take that patch of lawn in the shade; most of the dots reflect the local colors of the grass, others, orange-colored and much scarcer, express the barely perceptible influence of the sun; occasional purple dots establish the complementary color of green; a cyanine blue, necessitated by an adjacent patch of lawn in full sunlight, becomes increasingly dense closer to the borderline, but beyond this line gradually loses in intensity… Juxtaposed on the canvas but yet distinct, the colors reunite on the retina: hence we have before us not a mixture of pigment colors but a mixture of variously colored rays of light.”

‘Fénéon’s love for art was absolute, and even formed his political tastes. The failure by the “bourgeois” society to understand the real artists, its admiration with commonplace hacks, ‘sugary masters of schools and academies’, and its accusation of new and fresh trends — all this was enough for Fénéon to justify the destruction of that society. Fénéon approved of Anarchistic propaganda, even its extreme forms, which called for action using bombs.’ — Jeanne Picq

 

 

_____________

 

The Book

 

Novels in Three Lines
Felix Feneon
Translated and with an introduction by Lucy Sante
New York Review of Books (August 2007)

Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906 — true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

‘Fénéon’s three-line news items, considered as a single work, represent a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism…. They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush. And they depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.’

— From the Introduction by Lucy Sante

 

 

 

More

Life story
Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde
Paris rend hommage à Félix Fénéon
Sur les traces de l’insaisissable Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon: anarchist and aesthetic visionary
Félix Fénéon @ Twitter
Art, anarchism & Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon Teaches You How To Write

 

Still more

Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde

Art Critic Felix Feneon honoured at the Orangerie

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*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Oh, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘type’. I find him fascinating, but I’m not, like, sexually attracted to him or anything? Condolences about the Scottish match. What do I know about futbol, but isn’t Brazil one of the monster teams? But monsters fall, god knows. ** Carsten, Hi, No, I don’t think what’s extraordinary about RP is more discernible to gay people than straight people. A lot of the people I know who are big RP fans are also big fans of Kurt Cobain, so maybe there’s a crossover there? I never got the appeal of Mickey Rourke, except maybe in ‘Rumble Fish’. I hope Germany got beat. Maybe it’s a French thing, but everyone here seems to especially want Germany to crash out. You can swim in designated places in the Seine. And, because of the heatwave’s severity, they have unprecedentedly opened a section of the Canal St. Martin for swimming. I think that’s where everyone’s flocking. ** Joshua, Hi, Joshua. Good to see you. I assume you’ve watched ‘My Own Private River’. If not, it’s imbedded in the post and very highly recommended. Often amazing outtake footage from ‘Idaho’. I’m friends with Ann Magnuson who co-starred in ‘Jimmy Reardon’ with RP and made out with him in one scene. One time I asked her what that was like, and she looked at me with horror that I would ask her such a thing and said, ‘He was a child!’. And I was, like, ‘Dude, you’re the one who made out with him’. Here, me, at the moment … I’m just trying to live through a brutal heatwave that Paris is dealing with right now. Otherwise, writing, film stuff, the usual. I love when people write about my work through an analytical/social commentary lens. They’re the ones who get all the complications I put in there. I’m glad you’re able to at least chip away at your music. Stay cool. ** Bill, Oh, right, the new Araki opened Frameline this year, I think? Cool that it hit your mark. Thanks, the heat is insane, worst in recorded history and all of that. ** Laura, Hi. Oh, cool, I’m happy that Lou Christie’s weirdo finessed stuff made it through. In every photo I’ve seen of igloos, the inhabitants are still wrapped in multi-layered clothes inside, so it can’t be that warm? But I don’t know, obvs. Prompt? It’s too hot here to think in such a way. Uh, Félix Fénéon is your prompt. ** Steve, I was tentatively assigned to interview RP about his band for Spin Magazine not long before he died. I’ll see if I can find those two films. Very interesting! ** Adem Berbic, Alight! It sounds like a total success in the way that  a thing like that could be a success. Congrats!! ‘Book people’ sometimes need a while to catch up on something brand new, especially when its beginning involves a cool event. That’s they call them book people. Give them time. Many have tried to explode the screaming conflict between the literary and the social. It’s a slow build, I think. My friends and I did that with Beyond Baroque back in the early 80s, but it happened in increments and took a while. Word of mouth is a gradual accruer. Hang in there. Nothing like having one’s first book published to cement the writer identity in one’s head. That’s where life really begins even? ** jay, Hi. I’m slow cooking but still alive relatively speaking. Having had a number of people who were very important to me die young, and experiencing their plans and hopes and everything truncated like that, the effect is pretty intense. Love back to you. Just put the love in the refrigerator for a while before you experience it. ** laura w, Hi. Oh, let me think about that question re: movie adaptation > book when my brain isn’t being microwaved. I’m sure there are lots of examples. With mediocre novels dominating the list. Like I was saying up above, watch ‘My Own Private River’ if you haven’t. It was in the post, and it’s on youtube. If you find an evil book, clue me in. My weekend was spent hiding in my shitty air-conditioning. Not much to report about. xo. ** Uday, Enjoy the mountains. You have most of a whole week to do so. That sounds so yummy, even the snake bite. Well, maybe not the snake bite. ** HaRpEr //, I did survive the weekend so to speak. But starting today is when it gets really scary. All bets are off. I love baroque psychedelic pop, as I’m sure you know. The Left Banke! Even ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’. Everyone, HaRpEr // passes along a link to a video of River Phoenix interviewing hustlers as research for his ‘Idaho’ role, if you’re interested. Here. Whoa, amazing, the final tweaking and polishing! ** Alice, Hi. It’s so boring to keep saying but the insane heatwave is causing everything not to be very good at the moment. But I’m still upright. Beautiful ‘SbM’ story, thank you! You’re in Brussels. I assume you’re too north to get caught in our hell. Mm, I think my favorite Shyamalan is ‘Unbreakable’, except for the very ending which I remember thinking didn’t work, but I need to look again. Whatever you do today, it will seem utterly glorious to me. ** Right. Do you guys know the work of the French proto-minimalist writer, anarchist, and art critic Félix Fénéon? If not, the blog has you covered today. See you tomorrow.