Terminator 3, All The Pretty Horses, Sgt. Rock, Crusade, Boondock Saints and The Ticking Man !!!!

First let me say that I have read a draft of TERMINATOR 3, but that draft was NOT written by James Cameron. Some no-name schmo wrote it for producer Andy Vajna (who owns half the rights to the franchise), and it reeks. There is absolutely nothing in it that we haven't seen before, and the doofus even flubbed the name of Miles' kid. (It isn't Miles, Jr., you feeb. It's Danny. Do your research.) But something started shakin' on that project about a month ago. I don't know if Cameron is involved again, but I know everything went top-secret...and out of my humble domain.

And now on to the screenplays. I'll start with scripts for movies that are already in production.

This is late-breaking news, I suppose, but the first draft of THE TRUMAN SHOW was so good that I smuggled it around to all my friends, and they all loved it, too. I am given to understand the production draft has changed quite a bit. That draft was set in a faux New York, for example, and I never read Meryl (Truman's wife) as far over the top as Laura Linney appears to be playing her. Apparently, though, the finished product is just fine. Just as good was the draft I read of A SIMPLE PLAN, a FARGOesque drama being directed by Blammocam genius Sam Raimi.

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

I put off reading ALL THE PRETTY HORSES until I realized it was written by Ted Tally (the brilliant adaptation of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS); I'm not a big fan of Westerns, and a quick scan of the screenplay indicated it was awfully prose-y. Well, it is that, but the characters are well drawn and the script has its moments. Hopefully, Tally has made some much-needed cuts since the roughly 160-page draft that crossed my desk. Is it as good as SILENCE? I don't think so, not by a long shot--but as I've already admitted, it isn't my genre. PRETTY HORSES aspires to a bittersweet LONESOME DOVE quality that it doesn't even remotely attain.

SGT. ROCK

Subtle segue alert: It's interesting that SGT. ROCK has come up again on the pages of your fair empire, because I just finished reading an eight-year-old draft of the script. It was written by Jeffrey Boam, my shogun--you know him, you love him (INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, LETHAL WEAPON 2, TV's vastly underrated BRISCO COUNTY, JR.)...Unfortunately, there's something missing here. Boam's take on the venerable sergeant attempts to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to show the atrocity of war--this is easily an R-rated movie--while still showing Easy Company on a lighthearted romp through the battlefields of "SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE 1944." Boam also wears out running jokes like "It could be worse...At least it isn't raining" with the utterly inevitable payoff and the contents of Bulldozer's much-loved coffee. And while I'm certainly no admirer of Nazism, it seems politically incorrect now to refer to all German people as "Krauts." P.S. You are one hundred percent right, Harry: Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Sgt. Rock is one of the worst artistic ideas of the twentieth century, and there is NOTHING in the script (or comic) to indicate that the sergeant is really an Austrian-American named "Rockner." Pee-yew.

CRUSADE

And speaking of scripts you've mentioned recently, I just finished a revised draft (dated 1/24/93) draft of CRUSADE; it's credited to Walon Green with revisions by Gary Goldman. I must say, Lord Harry, I didn't care for it as much as you apparently did. Hagen is a cool character, especially as played by Iron Arnie, but he's no different morally from any of the other characters in the script. CRUSADE doesn't want to take a religious stand, although it does seem to indicate at one point that Hagen has had a Christian vision. The result is that we watch three religiously-motivated armies (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) fight over Jerusalem and its Holy Shrine, and we don't really care about any of them. Truth be told, I found the character of Ari (Hagen's little con man sidekick) far more interesting and complex. It's all terribly violent, even for Verhoeven--well, maybe I exaggerate!--but at least there's a creative escape from prison. And let us not forget that cool scene in which Hagen is silhouetted in the smoke of battle, a SHADOW WARRIOR much like myself, after which he...noooo, that's a bit TOO cool. I'll leave that one for the greedy masses to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say, I'll go see the movie (assuming it ever gets made), but I won't feel the need to rush out and see it in the first available showing. It's far more "cooool" than inspiring.

The Boondock Saints

Troy Duffy's THE BOONDOCK SAINTS was one draft away when I read it, so perhaps it's achieved complete ain't-it-coolness since then. The character of Rocco was WAY too Italian-stereotypical, and the mom stuff in the first half of Act I kept the movie from taking flight in those all-too-crucial first thirty pages. But someone will eventually make this movie, no matter how badly ol' Troy cheesed off the Fabulous Weinstein Brothers, so let's hope Mr. Duffy's hellaballistic ego can shut up just long enough to let his creative juices flow with laser accuracy. It's a clever and exciting tale in the making; it just needs a little tweak and a trim.

The Ticking Man

Oh, and then there's the oft-threatened THE TICKING MAN, by Manny Coto and Brian Helgeland...Unfortunately, this is the POSTMAN Brian Helgeland, not the L.A. CONFIDENTIAL Brian Helgeland. 'Nough said? Not quite. The lead character (called, imaginatively enough, "Ticking Man") is an android, utterly indistinguishable from a human being, that is ALSO A NUCLEAR BOMB, and it's set in the PRESENT DAY! I'm laughing already! Sigh. The inexplicably self-misspelled Moriarty would have a field day deconstructing that lame-brained concept.

Well, that just about wraps it up. I thought I had my hands on the newest Shane Black shooty-bang-bang-o-rama, but it turned out to be an old draft of THE LAST BOY SCOUT. However, I WILL be able to read KILLING MRS. TINGLE sometime next week, and I'll drop you another excessively verbose missive when I've finished it. Until then, champagne wishes and caviar dreams.