Intended as a place of discussion for a potential adaptation of the seminal comic The Sandman, which has languished in Hollywood's despondent pit of development hell for more than a decade.
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The Comic
The Sandman
Original run from January 1989 to March 1996
Published by Vertigo Comics (a DC imprint)
Written by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Dave McKean, Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Kelley Jones, Jill Thompson, Marc Hempel, Michael Zulli, Charles Vess, et al.
Originally published as 75 issues. Collected in 10 trade paperback volumes and 5 absolute hardcover editions.
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Supplemental Articles of Interest
For a limited time, Sandman #1 is
free. Grab it on
iBooks,
Comixology, and
Kindle!
Neil Gaiman and Chip Kidd: 20th Anniversary of Sandman. Question and Answer panel moderated by Chipp Kidd and featuring Neil Gaiman & David McKean. Run time 1:25:43.
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The Story So Far
With a prequel mini series on the cusp of happening (
The Sandman: Overture), there's been some talk of hopes to revivify The Sandman adaptation and try once more to
bring the King of Dreams to another medium. Neil Gaiman, the writer of the comic opus, has suggested an TV series as being ideal for the adaptation.
It should be noted that Gaiman penned a pilot script for an American Gods television series for HBO. Some reported that the series was greenlit for 6 season, but Gaiman later debunked this rumor as untrue.
He did confirm that three drafts were submitted and the last received adulation from the executives at HBO.
There was apparently a promising take on the project in the 90's with Roger Avary directing (hot off of Pulp Fiction) in conjunction with screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. Warner Bros. declared the script "undeliverable" to abdicate paying the writing duo. It's alleged that Peters wanted a more "traditional" super hero movie. As a supplementary, watch this
video in which Kevin Smith recounted his experience with Jon Peters and Superman Lives. Further reading in "Tales from Development Hell" by David Hughes edifies Peters's contributions. One of his ideas was to have Dream be captured by a bunch of teenagers holding a séance at a slumber party.
Avary did several more drafts, expanding and refining Elliot and Rossio's script, while also trying to collaborate with the Peters Company. Several dream sequences were planned and described as something along the lines of the visual style of
Jan Švankmajer. After a year of work, missteps, and disagreements, Avary departed the project. He cited his departure being a result of creative differences with the Peters Company.
Several drafts were later commissioned. One was infamously reviewed and torn apart by Ain't It Cool News. This draft was penned by William Farmer (he also took a pass at a Jonah Hex feature script). While I'm not an advocate of reviewing material in the middle of being created and refined, this script's story sounds egregious. Farmer later professed he wasn't familiar with the comic and felt the Avary/Rossio/Elliot junction was "nearly unfilmable." He described himself as a fledgling writer at the time and regretted letting the draft be impinged by suggestions from the producers and studio.
In the Farmer draft, it's the dawn of the new millennium and an apocalyptic-like scenario unfolds involving Rose and later "evolves" into Morpheus engaging in fisticuffs with The Corinthian (who were rewritten to be siblings). Ain't It Cool's Moriarty's
recollection of the plot follows below.
Rose Kendall is the daughter of wealthy industrialist and all around Really Famous Wacko Harlan Kendall. When she was very young, her father used her in some nutty experiment in which he killed her, opened the Dream Gate, captured Dream, then brought her back to life. In doing so, he also managed to take the ruby, the bag of sand, and the helmet. So far -- well, it’s at least vaguely recognizable. The Kendalls are new, but at least we’ve got Morpheus imprisoned and the icons of his office being scattered.
Rose is afflicted with lifelong nightmares in which the man from her dreams asks to be released. Finally, just a few days before the Millenium, Rose is attacked by someone yelling about the Nightmare Man. She’s taken to a hospital where she has an encounter with someone vaguely like Gaiman’s Death (although with far more “zany” wisecracks) and an “Angel” appears, coming through from another world when Rose dies briefly on the table. Nice how she keeps doing that, eh? He takes away her nightmares and disappears.
Back at the building her father built, there’s some sort of construction going on and the secret magic chamber where Kendall stuck Morpheus is found and blown up, releasing Morpheus. And here’s where things really go wrong, since the character that is released is a fairly indiscriminate killer with no real power of any kind. He beats some people up, jumps off something, gets hurt, and gets taken to the hospital. Morpheus. Lord of Dreams. Gets taken to a hospital after yelling tripe like, “As though your puny weapons could harm Morpheus! The lord of sleep! The Sandman!”
Well, of course the hospital that Morpheus is brought to just happens to be the same one Rose is in, and suddenly we’re in lame T2 ripoff country, with Morpheus going to look for Rose, and the Angel appearing again to save her. The twist here is that Morpheus is trying to kill Rose to save the world, while the Angel is actually the Corinthian, Morpheus’ brother, who has bet Lucifer, Morpheus’ other brother, that he can find the icons of Dream’s office first. Whoever gets them before the year 2000 wins. If neither does, then Lucifer takes over the earth for torture, misery, sorrow, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Really. That’s really the story. And the rest of the film’s just a dumb action film with these two fighting over and over, and with them beating up people to get the various items. The ruby’s in a safe in a pawn shop. The sand’s in the study of Rose’s house. And The Helmet? Well... giggle, giggle... dare I say it? It’s hidden inside Rose!
Huh?
What?
Did I miss something?
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE? Where did any of this crap come from? The Corinthian is Morpheus’ brother? Why? Lucifer is his other brother? How does this even begin to make any kind of sense? Farmer can’t even get the most basic motif of the books right. Scroll back up and check out the names of The Eternals. Notice a pattern involving the letter “D”? Well, Farmer evidently didn’t, since he’s changed the name of one of Dream’s sisters to “Love” when she shows up finally.
At the end, everything that happens in the book is just wiped away with that old familiar movie cop-out, “It was all just a dream.” Ugh. Gaiman never, never cheated us like that. Even if something happened in a dream, it mattered. It counted. That’s the whole point. Our dream lives and our waking lives are one and the same. One affects the other. Gaiman made the point over and over, and Farmer has ignored it utterly.
Gaiman lobbed venom at the script and called it the worst Sandman script he had read yet. The vitriol that followed led to this take being discarded by the studio. The Peters Company eventually abandoned the project after additional rewrites failed to gain traction.
At one point, DC attempted to mount an effort to have HBO option the property as TV series with James Mangold involved (him and Gaiman reportedly met to discuss the project). Warner Bros. Television was not asked to be involved. Talks eventually fell through.
Subsequent feature pitches and outlines were accepted by Warner Bros. Pictures to no avail. The studio then attempted to reach out to Neil Gaiman once more.
Gaiman provided an account of his last pitch, which was detailed in
Tales from Development Hell:
“We’d had all these paintings done so we could talk them through the storyline of the ten volumes of Sandman,” he says. “We had all the dolls, the statues, the things that have been made so that was there in front of them, and I did a two-hour presentation, and I remember sitting down and one of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Neil, that was very interesting. We went out for lunch recently and we figured that we’d worked out why the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, which are our two biggest hits of the last few years, were such successes, and we figured it out: it’s because they have clearly defined bad guys. Has Sandman got a clearly defined bad guy?’ And I said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ And they said, ‘It was great seeing you,’ and I walked out. And that was the last thing I ever heard about Sandman.”
Hughes, David. Tales From Development Hell (New Updated Edition): The Greatest Movies Never Made? (p. 162-163). Titan. Kindle Edition.
You can find the artwork used in this pitch by following this link:
Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’ Movie Pitch Art.
Another potential Sandman film was in the works at one time, although it starred Death. It was penned by Gaiman and an adaptation of his spin-off "Death: The High Cost of Living" The film was to be directed by Gaiman with Guillermo Del Toro serving as executive producer. Gaiman stated he shadowed Guillermo Del Toro on the set of "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" as preparation for the prospect of directing the picture.
Neil Gaiman later professed to the film oscillating in its traction.
VULTURE: People always want to know about Death: The High Cost of Living.
Neil Gaiman: Well, that one is mad. We kept almost getting it together, you know, like somebody climbing up the edge of a well. You’re an inch or two away from the top, and then you fall to the bottom and suddenly the film company isn’t there anymore or whatever. We just set it up again at a Warner-related company and everything was all ready. It was weird, though. If you had asked me in March of this year about Death, I would have told you that I thought it was pretty definitely dead. And if you’d asked me in April, I would have been thrilled and happy and said, "No, no, no, it’s absolutely on. And then in June, July, the new powers that be at DC and Warner basically closed everything down.
VULTURE: Really?
Neil Gaiman: So everything got closed down for reevaluation to decide what it was, to decide if they were making it or not. And Death is one of those things that’s been closed down. So, whether or not it will come back to life, I don’t know. Death seems amazingly hard to kill. And the truth is I will be happy either way. It was one of those things where I really wanted to make a Death movie because I knew that for me, the tone of voice was the most important thing about the movie. I didn’t want somebody to make a bad Death movie anymore than I want anybody to make a bad Sandman movie or TV series or whatever. So that’s the bit that’s important to me: Is it any good?
I’m lucky in that the money doesn’t matter. Actually, I say that as if that’s something that I’ve got now, but the money never mattered. On things like that, it was always the art. Back in 1992, I was sent in to have a meeting at Warner Bros. with Lisa Henson, who was a VP of production there, about a Sandman movie. I sat down and she said, “Well what do you want us to do?” And I said, “Well, would you mind not doing it? Because I’m working on the comic and it’s going really well, and it will be really messy.” And she said, “In all the years I’ve worked here, nobody’s come into this office and asked me not to make a movie before.” And I said, “Well I’m asking you not to make the movie.” And they didn’t, and I was incredibly relieved. It’s so easy with comics to get it wrong. And it’s also very easy for a bad movie to replace a good comic in the public mind. You know, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Howard the Duck.
Eric Kripke of Supernatural fame pitched a take on the property as a TV series to Gaiman and DC. Gaiman later announced that while both parties liked the concept, they found it wasn't quite right.
I saw a bunch of press about whether there is or isn't a Sandman TV series: as far as I know, nobody has actually optioned SANDMAN as a TV series from DC Comics, who own it. Eric Kripke (of Supernatural fame) pitched his approach to DC and to me last year, and we liked it and we liked him, but it didn't feel quite right at that point, so we passed.
I think that this year the people at DC Comics (and me) will talk to a lot of people who want to make a Sandman TV series, and if we find the perfect person with the perfect way of treating the material, it'll happen. And otherwise it won't.
Source:
Neil Gaiman.com The View from the Ice Storm.
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Editorial
A serial TV series is the only way to correctly capture the nature of the books.
With a thousand pages of material, Sandman is seminal not just for a few key elements, but for its collective whole. It's not just about the stories we tell, but why we tell them and what it means to have a rich lore. We inherently enjoy telling tales and listening. It's a method in which we glean things.
It's a serial narrative that is both cerebral and engaging, but also prohibitively expensive in the realm of features. It's a potential film that would cost at least $100-150 million to produce and doesn't necessarily appeal to a wide enough audience to justify its cost. More commercial attempts just eliminate the point of calling it a Sandman adaptation.
It'd also take a deft blend of visual effects with traditional effects to capture the correct look, which is another fickle notion. If the proper care isn't taken, the effect will be risible, tarnishing the general atmospherics of the work. Pulling off the imagery of Morpheus alone would be maddening. How should he travel? What would that actually look like? How would one deal with his rather amorphous forms? What would the dreams look like? The amount of time required for lighting, make-up, and tests just to nail the look of Dream would be tremendous. And there are still many other things to consider in this series of fantastical beings.
Like Watchmen, Sandman takes full advantage of the medium of comics. It transcends many comics because it etches a distinct world; something I feel would be lost in a feature length film.
I share Gaiman's sentiment: "I'd rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie." Make it a serial TV series (à la Sherlock, Game of Thrones, et al) or don't make it at all.
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What are your thoughts?
