AS A CERTAIN SWAMP dwelling Jedi Master once taught us, “Always in motion is the future.” But in Hollywood the past is equally in a state of flux. Every completed film trails countless possibilities behind it: discarded drafts of screenplays; abandoned storytelling choices; dead end plot avenues; characters and scenes that are tweaked, reshaped or deleted. Movies are built on the backs of what-ifs and might-have-beens. The ghosts of the great unmade haunt the screen, concealed between the frames of the final product.
“For me, it becomes an obsession with what could have been,” says Stephen Scarlata, co-host of the Best Movies Never Made podcast and producer of Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary on the cult filmmaker’s attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s epic SF novel to the screen. “I just need to know everything and put it together, the best I can in my head. It’s that mystery and how it would have shaped the landscape of cinema.”
About this time last year an alternate vision for Star Wars Episode IX tumbled through a crack in hyperspace. Jurassic World writer/ director Colin Trevorrow was Lucasfilm’s original choice to land the ending of the trilogy of trilogies. Collaborating with Derek Connolly (Jurassic World, Kong: Skull Island), he delivered a draft of the screenplay in December 2016, only to leave the project by September 2017, replaced by JJ Abrams.
This story is from the February 2021 edition of SFX.
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This story is from the February 2021 edition of SFX.
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