EXCLUSIVE: Interview With TALES FROM DEVELOPMENT HELL Author David Hughes

A compulsively readable journey into the area of movie-making where all writers, directors and stars fear to tread: Development Hell, the place where scripts are written, actors hired and sets designed... but the movies rarely actually get made!

Whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky's Batman movie starring Clint Eastwood? Why were there so many scripts written over the years for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's fourth Indiana Jones movie? Why was Lara Croft's journey to the big screen so tortuous, and what prevented Paul Verhoeven from filming what he calls "one of the greatest scripts ever written"? Why did Ridley Scott's Crisis in the Hot Zone collapse days away from filming, and were the Beatles really set to star in Lord of the Rings? What does Neil Gaiman think of the attempts to adapt his comic book series The Sandman?

All these lost projects, and more, are covered in this major book, which features many exclusive interviews with the writers and directors involved.

I've always been fascinated by the concept of 'things that never were', things (buildings, cars, films) that might exist in another universe. What did the rejected designs for the Eiffel tower look like? How many design prototypes were rejected for every American car made in the 1950s? Film just happens to be the area I feel most qualified to write about.

It's been hugely revised and updated since the first edition was published back in 2003, not only bringing things up to date but also rounding out previous chapters with new material, new interviews and hopefully new insights. There are also two brand new chapters for this, the first paperback edition of the book. Plus the original edition, being only hardcover, sold in fairly limited numbers, so it's really like a brand new book.

Once my editor, Adam Newell, and myself had agreed on a 'long list' of projects we might want to cover, I began researching about 25 films - more than I would actually need for the final book, but enough to allow a few chapters to drop out if they suddenly got made, or if they led me up a blind alley - if nobody at all wants to talk about a film in development, even if you can get hold of a script, there isn't really much you can say about it. Interviews were always going to be the core of the book, so I wanted to make sure I could actually talk to the people involved. The fact that I was able to get so many heavy hitters shows that even the biggest names in Hollywood have had their taste of Development Hell.

It was always painful for them: if films are the children of writers, directors and producers, projects like this are miscarriages, terminations and stillbirths. But listen to some of the interviewees - the chapter on Neil Gaiman's Sandman comes to mind - and you will see some catharsis there, some therapy. Talking about these projects - and writers NEVER get tired of talking about their scripts - was a way to get some perspective on them, I think. Certainly that's the case in the final chapter, which covers my own various ventures into Development Hell.

If there was a Hell, endless repetition of anything would drive you insane, and that's what happens so much of the time: endless rewrites without any sense of progression. Is it better? Or just different? After a while, you lose perspective. But it's always easier - and a HELL of a lot cheaper and less risky - to commission one more draft than it is to man up and make the movie. So studios often want to see a dozen different 'takes' on a property before they go ahead with it. And even then, they don't always back the right horse - look at Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, which didn't have 1/10th the imagination of the Oliver Stone/James Cameron and other versions covered in the book.

Yes! But I tried hard not to editorialize - I'd rather let the readers draw their own conclusions about the relative merits (or lack thereof) of the unproduced projects. I also thought it would be amusing for the readers to hear (almost) every screenwriter come in and say "The previous drafts were rubbish" and then describe how they planned to save the day! It was quite refreshing when writers (such as the endlessly classy Tab Murphy) gave credit to their predecessors on a project.

Again, it's a lot less risky to write a lot of small checks (a million here, half a million there) for another draft by whatever screenwriter just wrote the weekend's big hit, than it is to write The Big Check, $100-$200 million, to actually make the movie. And as Neil Gaiman says in the book, if every decision is defensible - "We made Speed Racer based on the combination of brand recognition, the directors' track record, and the star's trajectory at the time" - the chances of getting fired are significantly reduced.

You spend several years and millions of dollars developing a film until you finally give it a green light, and at the end of the day it's still a crapshoot. Was it wrong to abandon the great Batman/Superman or Batman vs Superman project in favour of Batman Begins? At the time, nobody knew. But the legacy of Batman Begins - the sequel being one of the biggest films of all time - speaks for itself. Personally I don't think big enough to think that any film, even a Bat-film, would outdo the epoch-making, Zeitgeist-capturing Tim Burton Batman of the summer of '89 - and then The Dark Knight happened. "Nobody knows anything" William Goldlam famously said of Hollywood - and that was about 30 years ago. Studios know even less today - except to back the justifiable over the inspirational.

Well back then I wanted to include the obvious superhero comic books but also widen the brief to include other interesting comic book movies, such as Ghost World, Men in Black, Blade, Road to Perdition etc. After all, the book was called Comic Book Movies (catchy name, don't you think? ;) not Superhero Movies. Today, I'm pleased to say (as a massive comic book movie fan) I would find it hard to narrow the chapter choice down to a manageable level, and I would even include some of the superhero films which aren't widely loved. Why? I'm just a sucker for this stuff. To me, comic book movies are like pizza: even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. Then there are the "comic book movies" which aren't based on comic books at all - and they're interesting as hell, because just as Watchmen (the comic) played with the tropes, themes and trappings of comic book superheroes (one of the reasons why the film was so difficult to get right), superhero movies now have the ability to toy in a similar way with the themes of superhero movies (hence Kick-Ass, Super, Chronicle, etc.) because the audience is aware of the elements that comprise them. So for a comic book and comic book movie nut like me, it's a great time to be alive.

You know what? I loved Thor, Captain America, Iron Man etc. as much as the next man, but I'm finding it hard to get excited about the Avengers movie. Spider-Man looks cool and I do think the franchise was in need of a reboot, but I don't know what it will have that the Raimi films didn't (my theory is that if you put bits of the three Spider-Man films together, you get one good one) because the CG etc had already been perfected then. And The Dark Knight Rises...can it really improve on its predecessor? Frankly I'm about 50% less interested in any of these since I saw Chronicle: for me, Chronicle was so fresh and new and different that it instantly made every other superhero flick look creaky and old-fashioned.

I'm glad you asked! I have a thrillingly full plate. Much as I'd love to be writing a 2013 edition of Comic Book Movies, Virgin Books isn't interested so I'm a bit stuck there! As well as various screenwriting obligations, I am producing a low-budget Western (!) based on a script that was written for Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen, but was then lost for 40 years until I unearthed it last year and optioned it. There's a director attached (Susan Jacobson, who directed the low-budget British thriller The Holding last year) but no cast as yet - and it's very exciting/exhilarating! I'm also still writing for the UK's Empire magazine, which I've been doing since issue 2 back in 1989, and trying to keep my bog active (http://www.groovyfokker.blogspot.com) though those kinds of things take a full-time commitment these days and don't pay the bills, so...