Lately there’s been a lot of talk about ‘Sandman’, the series of Netflix that has been number 1 on the platform for three weeks and that despite this it could be canceled. However, there were many previous projects to adapt the comic from Neil Gaman and now its author has revealed that he sabotaged an attempt to bring it to the big screen that promised to be a huge mess.
All this happened in the 90s, when the producer Jon Peters set his sights on ‘Sandman’ to make it into a movie. Gaiman himself makes it very clear what nonsense he promised to be when he recalled in Rolling Stone what his argument was going to be:
He had a giant mechanical spider. But much more important than that, Lucifer, Morpheus and the Corinthian were identical triplets. They were a family of identical brothers, and it was all a race to see who could get the ruby, the rudder, and the punching bag before midnight in 1999, before the new millennium began, because whoever got it would be the winner. That was the plot.
In addition, the script was not very successful either, as Gaiman himself acknowledges that, even leaving aside the fact of being based on ‘Sandman’, it was the worst thing he had ever read and how he responded when asked for his opinion:
I remember they called me on the phone. And normally, I am polite and friendly if they call me on the phone. I try to find positive things to say to the people who call you on the phone. And a guy from Jon Peters’ office called me on the phone and said, “So Neil, have you had a chance to read the script we sent you?
And I said, “Well, yes. Yes, I have. I haven’t read all of it, but I have read enough.” And he said to me, “So, it’s pretty good. Huh?” And I said, “Well, no. It really isn’t.” He said, “Oh, come on. There must be things in there that you like.” I told him, “There was nothing I liked. There was nothing I liked. It was the worst script I’ve ever read by anyone. It’s not just the worst Sandman script. It was the worst script I’ve ever been sent.”
And then there was a pause. He said, “Oh come on. That thing where we made the Corinthian the Sandman’s brother, it was good. Huh?” And I was like, “No, that was really stupid.” And he said, “Oh, well, that’s fine. You can’t win them all.” And I said, “No, you really can’t.” And I hung up the phone and thought, what do I do now?
It was then that he decided to follow the same strategy used by Peter Jackson to make his adaptation of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ end up being a trilogy: filter it. The chosen medium was Ain’t It Cool News, and Gaiman managed to get away with it:
I sent the script to Ain’t It Cool News, which was being read by people at the time. And I thought, I wonder what Ain’t It Cool News thinks of the script that they’re going to receive anonymously. And they wrote a fabulous article about what the worst script they’d ever been sent was like. And suddenly the possibility of that movie happening disappeared. And instead, Jon Peters turned his attention to ‘Wild Wild West’
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