Contemplating how bad most movies are today can be a depressing undertaking, especially when you think about how many truly extraordinary movies by extraordinary filmmakers were not only never made, but never made it out of the planning stages. Here are ten films that, for the most part, existed only in the minds of their creators. Some were pipe dreams; a few advanced to the planning stages; none of them were made in anything like the form in which they were conceived. So the next time you’re watching some mindless romantic comedy or an asinine mumblecore atrocity masquerading as art, weep over the fact that those movies exist and these don’t.
10 Gangs of New York
The Film: Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, starring The Clash.
This one was finally made in 1999 with Daniel Day-Lewis chewing up all the scenery in sight – including co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. When it came out, it divided critics and audiences, some of whom think it’s a masterpiece while others think it’s an unholy mess. God knows what they would have thought if it had actually been made back in the mid-’70s, when it was first conceived as a vehicle for punk-rock legends The Clash.
[amazon asin=B006RXQ800&template=*lrc ad (left)]Having just gained fame and fortune with 1976’s Taxi Driver, director Martin Scorsese had the clout to make almost anything he wanted, and what he wanted was to make a film of Herbert Asbury’s mammoth history of the New York underworld as a big-budget historical epic starring The Clash, who would also do the soundtrack. In short, Gangs of New York was originally supposed to feature Joe Strummer and his fellow oiks axe-murdering their way through 1860s New York to the sounds of “Clash City Rocker” and “I’m So Bored With the USA,” or something along those lines.
By the time Scorsese finally got around to pitching it, however, his musical extravaganza New York New York had flopped and Star Wars had come out, changing Hollywood into a machine for the kind of special-effects blockbusters Scorsese wasn’t interested in making. Gangs went into hibernation for over twenty years and The Clash idea, needless to say, was dropped.[amazon asin=B000286RR0&template=*lrc ad (right)]
A small trace of the original idea for Gangs remains in the finished film, when Peter Gabriel’s “Signal to Noise” serves as the very anachronistic soundtrack to the opening fight scene, but for the most part Gangs of New York ended up a pretty conventional historical epic. For better or worse, the original would probably have been a lot more interesting.
9 Lord of the Rings
[amazon asin=B00AEFXN9G&template=*lrc ad (left)]The Film: Lord of the Rings starring The Beatles.
This one may or may not have been anything more than a rumor, or a brief idea that surfaced in between acid trips and cutting Sergeant Pepper, but the story persists that throughout the 1960s, the Fab Four made several attempts to purchase the rights to JRR Tolkein’s ubergeek masterpiece as a vehicle for themselves.
It’s difficult to even begin to imagine what this movie would have been like. Even the thought of casting it boggles the mind. Ringo as Samwise Gamgee? Paul as Legolas? George as Treebeard? John as… who the hell knows? Given that all the other Beatles movies were comedies and/or music films, this one would have been completely uncharted territory.[amazon asin=B000UJ48VI&template=*lrc ad (right)]
On the other hand, the Beatles never made a really bad film, and their fame and money could have attracted major talent to any project they were involved in. Moreover, the director of their first two films, Richard Lester – who could easily have been called upon again – is a brilliant filmmaker whose work on the Three Musketeers films proves he could handle big, epic productions. This one was so crazy it might actually have worked.
8 Masque of the Red Death
[amazon asin=0451947673&template=*lrc ad (left)]The Film: Akira Kurosawa’s The Masque of the Red Death.
This one mostly exists as nothing more than an aside in Donald Richie’s comprehensive book The Films of Akira Kurosawa, but rumor has it that the master Japanese filmmaker, who gave us such classics as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, as well as inspiring filmmakers from George Lucas to Sergio Leone (the storyline of Star Wars is yanked from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, and A Fistful of Dollars is a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo), wrote a completed script that transferred Edgar Allen Poe’s macabre short story to Japan.
Given Kurosawa’s success in adapting other Western literary works like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, as well as Doestoevski’s The Idiot, this has to be one of the most tantalizing possibilities on this list. Kurosawa’s work ranges from historical epics to intimate family dramas, but he never made a horror film, and – good or bad – it would have been fascinating to see his take on the genre.
Unfortunately, by the time the script was written, the Japanese film industry had shifted to making cheap monster films like Godzilla, and Kurosawa was out of a job for years, only coming back in the early ‘80s with the help of foreign financing. Masque of the Red Death got lost along the way.
