As you might have guessed from the above post I have spent much of the last week immersed in that Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr Moreau set from Severin. It is fascinating to view even for someone such as myself who has never seen the apparently disastrous 1996 John Frankenheimer directed film that resulted from all the turmoil around Stanley getting replaced and Brando and Kilmer's battling egos. I would say that I avoided the Frankenheimer film on principle, but I seem to remember that at the time I only had the funds to choose one Val Kilmer starring period wild animal film and opted for
The Ghost and the Darkness instead, which seemingly was the far better choice! Watching this documentary has left me perversely wanting to see the Frankenheimer Island of Dr Moreau though, as I cannot imagine it turning out well, but I get the impression that the final result was more just dull than disastrous! (It was interesting to hear Frankenheimer's comments in the archive interview on the disc though that he felt that his version would have been approved of by H.G. Wells as it was getting the closest to condemning science for meddling with nature, when it kind of seems that in the novel that Moreau is sort of sympathetically portrayed, albeit delusional!)
Lost Soul, while obviously being sympathetic to Richard Stanley’s point of view, does also give everyone else their moments. Except Val Kilmer, he still comes out of it badly! (Though there is the comment that this was all happening at the time that his marriage to Joanne Whalley was falling apart, which seemed to make him extra controlling and aggressive). Frankenheimer doesn’t come out of it too well either, though as someone drafted in at the eleventh hour it makes sense that he wouldn’t have any particular investment in the project aside from just getting it to the finishing line. I also lost quite a lot of sympathy for Bob Shaye during this film, especially in his example of Richard Stanley always doing something “goofy” to ruin meetings being a description of the time when Stanley asked for three or four sugars in his tea during a meeting! Very strange that animosity can rest on something as petty as that, to the extent of it being remembered decades later! As a three sugar in tea person myself, I was squarely on Stanley’s side there! But it does lead to a great quote:
Bob Shaye wrote:"Nobody takes four sugars in a cup of coffee and walks out as a solid citizen"
It was fascinating to hear Stanley go into his ideas for his version of the Island of Dr Moreau, something that would have stuck a little closer to the original novel, although I really liked his idea for modernising the opening from a shipwreck to a plane being brought down by an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear bomb, leaving the isolated island as potentially the last vestige of ‘humanity’, which seems as if it would have helped to emphasise the suggestion from the novel of the horrible legacy which has been left to the animals that have been cut and moulded into men, instilled with imposed morals, ethics and religious codes, only to be left entirely alone to clean up the devastation that humanity had wrought and with their inherent bestial natures nagging at them to revert. And I really like the idea that Stanley was going to throw in a few ideas from Joseph Conrad into his adaptation too (the 'panther woman', which wasn't there in the same form in the novel but had been added for the previous film versions (in a strange way making the otherwise tamer film versions in need of a shoehorned in love interest become even more perverse with their suggestions of bestiality!) being in Stanley's script apparently taken from a character in Conrad's Outcast of the Islands) to make up for Conrad having apparently copied the structure of Island of Dr Moreau for Heart of Darkness!
I agree with some of the reviews of this documentary that have said that it was really folly from the start to have tried to do such a hugely ambitious adaptation, keeping all of the inherent perversities of the novel and even seemingly elaborating on them further, with a Hollywood studio. (Stanley on a love scene with the panther woman: "There this moment when he's working his way down from one nipple to the next and realises along the way that she is not human, which really upset [the New Line executive] who said that it would upset menopausal women all over America") Though the early part of the documentary suggests that this was the only way it could have ever have even potentially been made, as you’d need a studio to do the negotiating with H.G. Wells’s estate (which arguably aside from Spielberg’s War of the Worlds has not been well served by films in recent decades. The Island of Dr Moreau debacle was the most notorious, but the 2002 version of The Time Machine, directed by Wells’ great-grandson no less, still spectacularly failed to grasp the nuances of its source material), so without that backing there would probably be little chance of an independent producer getting a version off the ground.
The documentary does a great job of sketching in all of the terrible series of unfortunate events that all combined into complete disaster. Personal problems (with Kilmer’s divorce and the suicide of Brando’s daughter just before shooting, which I assume meant that their minds were more focused on other matters than the film itself), studio wranglings and even small environmental problems of the sets getting flooded and shut down by a hurricane all combine to totally hamstring the production from almost the very beginning, seemingly providing a lot of the pretexts for the directorial change (after all I remember stories of terrible storms occurring during the shooting of Jurassic Park, but those acts of God were setbacks but did not cause such an upheaval to the production as to remove a director), even if Stanley
had chosen the rainiest part of an isolated area of Australia for a location! It more seems that everyone approached the project with wildly different perspectives that all clashed together and in particular it sounds as if New Line greenlit the film but then did not really back it, with the suggestion that moving more upscale in terms of prestigious productions made a horror sci-fi film look less appealing (as suggested by the way that they attempted to get Roman Polanski to direct it at one stage, which appalled Stanley who thought that he was the actual director! Though he heartbreakingly says that he perhaps should not have fought so hard at that stage and maybe just stayed on the project as some kind of support to Polanski, and that would have at least resulted in a decent film, if not his film). There is the tantalising casting section of all of the potential casting of the film, with Brando, James Woods and Bruce Willis mooted for roles, before all the directorial changes and Kilmer wanting to swap roles ended up with actors dropping out.
It was interesting to note from his extended interview in the extras that Stanley had been offered the chance to direct the Stallone version of Judge Dredd around this time but had turned it down, which he says in retrospect was probably the wrong choice. Although from the sound of it the problematic script rewrites that were manipulating the source material of even that film were already taking place even at that stage. Perhaps it would have been easier to wrangle or compromise with material that was not quite so close to his heart though, as it really seems that the Dr Moreau experience destroyed Stanley as a filmmaker, not just career-wise but also from the enjoyment of making films for a while.
This really illustrates that studio interference patently did not help the film in any way. The film that Richard Stanley had been planning on might have been wildly uncommercial or potentially not very good either, but at least even a unsatisfying resultant film would have had a vision or sense of discernable purpose about it (I’m thinking of something like Clive Barker's Nightbreed here, which I respect more than like at the moment, though I haven’t seen the director’s cut of that yet which may be better!) The journey of the documentary is one of showing a passion project getting degraded down further and further until the forced directorial change to Frankenheimer kills any sense of interest or commitment that anyone has in the project. The final film ends up just being made not because it is a fascinating tale that might speak to modern audiences, or even just an entertaining brainless action romp (like the 70s version), but instead it seems to have been finished just because it would have been far more expensive to just stop the production outright. Even the colossal, embarrassing flop that destroyed (or at least stunted for a while) careers and reputations was less important than the box office that could be made from releasing the resulting mess.
The interviews with Rob Morrow, Fairuza Balk and Marco Hofschneider are amazing and it is also heartbreaking to see their enthusiasms for the project getting lost as they see everything fall apart. Balk gets forced to stay on the production but it sounds as if her character was left with little to do. Hofschneider gets what sounds like a key and important role completely removed from him (though he sadly recalls that his agent was happy as his client had made lots of money from the overrunning production! In artistic terms though, it sounds as if Hofschneider had one of the worst times on set. Especially in recounting a confrontation with Kilmer in which Kilmer praises Hofschneider for his previous role in Europa, Europa and then tells him words to the effect that there is only room for one lead actor on the set!) From the sound of it, it sounds as if Brando, coming onto set late once everything had fallen apart, had the right idea in treating the entire situation with the utter contempt it deserved (though he was probably in a better position from seemingly not having too much of an interest in the production due to various circumstances) and it seems that a lot of the crazier mannerisms, such as the whiteface makeup, came from his early discussions about the character with Stanley (I like that moment when Stanley talks about Brando having the idea of disappearing into the darkness, but that he had already done this with Apocalypse Now, so they thought the white makeup would be an interesting contrast!) So, while the documentary mentions the infamous (and metaphorically apt) story of Stanley sneaking back onto set dressed as one of the beast-men extras, it sort of sounds as if Brando was already raising the ghost of the previous director and signalling his contempt for the production by invoking some of Stanley’s ideas from when the film actually was going to have some meaning about it!
I guess it would be interesting to hear the views of Val Kilmer and David Thewlis about the film too, but I do not think that is ever realistically going to happen. Thewlis might have an interesting perspective on all this as someone who only came onto set once it became a John Frankenheimer film and Rob Morrow quit, but then he may not have had anything to contribute to the film having arrived at such a late stage of a disastrous production. Although he was taking over the ‘lead’ role of the audience identification character.
The three disc edition features a great extra of a CD-ROM with mp3s of Stanley reading the original story (22 chapters running 4 hours and 50 minutes) and another disc focused on H.G. Wells with an interesting recently discovered German silent film that is
kind of based on the story, called Island of the Lost. Island of the Lost has a really strange set up for its story though, as a man (who seemingly has a submarine to command at whim?!?!?) reads in a newspaper that they have found a named SOS note from his previous fiancée who went missing on a boating expedition. The newspaper, despite having a name and presumably there being records of a missing person, and despite printing the note on their front page, describes it as a hoax! But our 'hero' decides that he'd better take his submarine and go searching for her, if only because he needs to silence her before his new fiancée finds out about the whole affair! There is a whole love triangle (love square?) set up between this awful guy, his friend and his two girls (one of whom heads the rescue mission, which is sort of a successful version of the girlfriend looking for her horrible boyfriend in the much later Cannibal Ferox!) which is the kind of set up that makes the island inhabited by a crazed vivisectionist seem tame when it finally arrives! There are also a couple of 'of their time' racial stereotypes around, such as the Chinese henchman who spends his time begging the doctor for opium, or the cowardly black butler who 'goes native' with the last remaining islander (why exactly the submarine needed a tuxedo clad butler in the first place is a good question to ask, but I guess it allows him to throw off his suit and don a tribal chieftan's garb, complete with nose ring, later on! And then hurriedly put the tuxedo back on to abandon his native bride when it looks as if a ship is arriving! Only for her to beat him up when the ship does not stop!), and the mad scientist here is much more into 'mixing and matching' his animals and stitching different parts of them together than sculpting a single animal into a human-looking one, which makes him more of your generic prototype mad scientist figure than a Dr Moreau one specifically, despite his speech about being a 'sculptor' early on. Though that does allow the bullied Chinese henchman the chance to get his own back by giving the mad scientist a tiger's heart instead of the heroine's human one to stick into his 'artificial person'!
Anyway it is a fascinating set (with a few flaws: the Severin watermark popping up in the right hand corner of the screen for thirty seconds every five minutes or so on Island of the Lost and the unrestored nature of that film (though its not bad at all for a film of its vintage) and The Invisible Thief, though their rarity prevents me from being too harsh! The Invisible Thief is presented completely silent, while Island of the Lost has a strangely emphatically upbeat piano score for what is a rather blackly comic film! And there are hard of hearing subtitles on the documentary itself but unfortunately they are full of spelling mistakes, and one moment in which an actor's name is turned into another name entirely, so if you require those prepare yourself for a few "faux pa"), though if you are only interested in the controversy about the 1996 film and not so much in the reading of the H.G. Wells novel or the Wells-centric features and silent films then there is a Blu-ray of just that single disc available (the other two discs feature in the "House of Pain" three disc edition!).
This is not really related to anything above but amusingly I have also recently been listening through a compilation of music by Orbital and their track from their Snivilisation album
Are We Here? feels apt as a nice piece of end credits music for my Dr Moreau experience(s)!
