It has been said that there are two things that you never want to watch being made -- Law and Sausages.
Add Movies to this list. Here is a very long post outlining the history of the upcoming Superman V movie. It starts in 1987, was scheduled for release in 1989 and is still in production. Here is the first little bit of the story:
...The stange and evil tale of the production of Superman V.
It spans decades, $50,000,000 is spent before they even have even settled on a writer or director. It's so horrible. It's out of date as it stops in the middle of 2004, but it's so horrible, you have to read it.
The whole thing started in 1987. The Israeli producing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (who were cousins, by the way) had bought the film rights to Superman from Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the obnoxious father-son duo who made the first three films. WB gave Golan and Globus' production company Cannon Films $40 million bucks to make Superman IV, and Golan-Globus took the money and spent it all on their other pictures.
They only spent $17 million on Superman IV, chopping out key plot sequences (a grand total of 45 minutes' worth of critical story material was excised) and gutting the FX in order to keep the costs down. Anyway, Superman IV bombed because of the hack job Golan-Globus did on it. But since they still had the rights to Superman, they decided to make a fifth film for release in 1989, with Captain America (the one with Matt Salinger and Ronny Cox) director Albert Pyun at the helm.
They also planned to reuse all the edited material from Superman IV and to recast Superman with another actor (their antics on IV left Reeve outraged with them). However, Cannon fell on hard times and Golan left to make his own company, 21st Century Films (which went under in the early '90s - he's since re-founded Cannon), and the rights to Superman reverted back to the Salkinds. This was when Superboy was in full swing on TV, and the Salkinds decided to restart the Superman film series using Superboy as the prequel. Hence, Superman comic scribe Cary Bates and his Superboy writing partner Mark Jones were drafted to write a script pitting Superman against Brainiac in a story set in the bottled city of Kandor. Under the working title Superman: The New Movie, this film was to have been released in 1994, with Superboy star Gerard Christopher taking over for Reeve as Superman. (To this day, the deleted footage from Superman IV remains unaccounted for.)
Well, 1993 rolled around, and WB bought all the non-comics rights to Superman lock, stock, and barrel. WB forced the Salkinds to pull Superboy from the airwaves completely so as not to interfere with the planned Lois & Clark series (which Gerard Christopher auditioned for, and was turned down because he'd played Superboy - that's how Dean Cain got the part), and scrapped the Bates/Jones script. Deciding to base the movie on the "death and return" story from the comic books (they figured that the big sales figures the story racked up would translate into box office success), WB turned the project over to their pet producer Jon Peters - an illiterate, violence-prone wild man (I wish I was making this up, but I'm not - this is all true, every word of it) who got his start as Barbra Streisand's hairdresser/lover and produced the Tim Burton Batman films. Peters, who hates the classic Superman in every way imaginable, set out to reinvent Superman in the "sex, killing, rock & roll, and whatever movie was a hit last weekend" style that all of his movies are based in. So he hired Jonathan Lemkin to write the script.
And a little bit more about Jon Peters:
And this is where things got REALLY ugly. First off, Smith was taken aback when Peters asked him, in all sincerity, "Kal-El? Who's this Kal-El guy you keep mentioning in the script?" Then the insanity really started to take over. Peters demanded that Superman be stripped of his red and blue suit, arguing that the suit was "too pink, too f@ggy."
It is a long read that involves Tim Burton, Russell Crowe, Jim Carrey (cast as Brainiac) and David Duchovny (cast as Superman), Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, Lara Flynn Boyle and many many more... Amazing -- if this was a legitimate business, these managers would have been sacked a long long time ago. It is a long read but if you are interested in the innner workings of commercial film-making, it is well worth the 20 minutes or so of your time...
