Because some things should be kept around for posterity.

I love this so much. “A walking STD farm!!”. Oh, Brian.

Why It’s A Good Thing That I Don’t Run A Comic Book Company, Part 23

Quick quiz: Is this one of the greatest comic covers ever?

Choose from the following:

• A – Yes
• B – Possibly, but I’m kind of freaked out by Batman calling all those other characters “crimes”
• C – No

The correct answer is “Definitely not C,” and it makes me wonder why we don’t have awesome monthly digests like this these days. Never mind DC’s trade paperbacks and Showcase editions – I want cheap, mass-market collections reprinting stories that may not be fan favorites or shaken the world, but are just plain fun. You know, like 11 shorts from Detective Comics, for example. If I were running DC (and thank God that I’m not, both for my sake and yours, comic fans), I’d create a line of cheap reprints that came out every month, and just to make sure that sales were high, I’d get Jim Lee to do two pages of continuity-heavy crossover “must have” story in each issue. Sure, the fans would complain, but they’d also get the opportunity to read that “Never mind Harry Potter, here’s fucking Amethyst, you philistines” issue I’ve been planning for years.

The Watchmen Movies You Never Saw

(I know, I know; I promise new stuff and then don’t put anything up for a month. What can I say? I’m lazy. So lazy, in fact, that instead of all-new stuff, here’s another essay written for the Comix Experience Onomatopeia newsletter; this one was in the… March issue, I think? It was definitely written just before the Watchmen movie was released, anyway. It already feels quaintly nostalgic. Remember when people cared about Watchmen? We were all so much younger back then.)

March 6th, 2009, has already become one of those strangely iconic dates in the pop culture calendar, just like whatever day it was that Star Wars got released back in 1977. That date, of course, marks the long-awaited release of Watchmen, which - as the trailer will happily tell you – adapts “the most celebrated graphic novel of all time” into a movie directed by the “visionary director of 300,” Zack Snyder. Now – putting aside the fact that Watchmen may be many things, but is clearly not the “most celebrated graphic novel of all time” in a world where Onslaught: The Complete Saga is available in collected form – it’s fair to say that a movie version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic late ’80s series has been the Holy Grail of movie-obsessed comic fans since the comics’ release, over 20 years ago. In fact, Snyder – a former advertisement director who’s brought the same depth and intellect to his movie work, only with less convincing CGI effects – was not the first director to try and adapt this great work into motion picture format… nor was he the first to risk fan wrath by changing certain things about the story in order to make the tale of a glowing blue naked god who hangs out with the world’s smartest man who happens to have an Egyptian fetish and a guy who likes beans more palatable to a mainstream audience. Come with me now, as I take you behind the curtain of Hollywood and reveal… The Watchmen Movies You Never Saw.

1989

It’s the end of the 1980s, and as the yuppie zeitgeist of that decade gets replaced by the oncoming internet age, Tim Burton’s Batman has redefined cinema as the kind of place where Jack Nicholson doesn’t even try anymore and you can’t get that damn Prince song out of your head. Warner Bros., eager to try and duplicate the success of that movie, consider the possibility of turning the recently-completed, critically-acclaimed Watchmen into a movie, and approach Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons about the possibility. Amazingly, Moore is the enthusiastic one at this point (Gibbons stating in an interview at the time that “A Watchmen movie is a terrible idea, and I’ll fight it until my career has stalled and I’ll be writing Green Lantern Corps or something just to make ends meet and be desperate for the money. If that day ever comes, you’ll be stunned by how enthusiastically I’ll sell out. I mean, I’d not only tour the world talking about the movie and how closely it resembles the comic despite the way that compressing twelve issues into three hours means that the book’s humanity is sacrificed for slow-motion spectacle, but I’d even release an expensive hardcover coffee table book of sketches to tie-in with it. I’d end up calling it Watching The Watchmen or Thank You For Contributing To My Retirement Plan or something”), and offers to write the screenplay.

Excited by the idea of a Moore-written adaptation, Warners quickly lines up Dustin Hoffman to play Rorschach, Dan Ackroyd to play Nite Owl and Bruce Willis to play some random balding hard-ass who’s wandered in off the streets and will try to save the day despite complaining about it for the entire movie. A late October edition of Hollywood trade paper Variety that year announced that veteran director Oliver Stone (fresh from an Oscar win for Born On The Fourth Of July) would helm the project… and then everything went quiet.

What happened? The problem, of course, was with Moore’s script. Stone – a well-known illiterate who hires small children to read his scripts to him while he reclines in a toga eating grapes – was appalled when a 764-page script appeared on his doorstep one morning, and his rage only increased when, upon reaching the end weeks later, he discovered that this was only Moore’s script for the first scene of the movie. Warners executives at the time even now will only speak about the incident off the record and on condition of anonymity, but explain that part of the problem came from the famously verbose Moore’s overexplanation of every single element of the scene – including the complete history of the building the scene was to take place in – but also the fact that Moore had also taken the opportunity, midway through the third line of dialogue spoken in the scene, to write a lengthy appreciation of Stone’s films, only to admonish him for his choosing Tom Cruise as a lead in anything, and closing with a staunch denouncement of Scientology, before completing said line of dialogue. Stone was flattered and outraged, and demanded that Moore be taken off the project. After a short period where Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm turned in a draft that relocated the story to a futuristic America called Grimmsville, Stone lost interest and the project was shelved.

1992

The early ’90s were a new golden age for comics as long as you didn’t read them, and Hollywood was, yet again, eager for a slice of that tasty, tasty money pie. This time, however, Warner Bros. – having been burned by their previous involvement with Watchmen – passed on the opportunity to option the series for a movie, and the hungry 20th Century Fox stepped in with a bold new direction: An animated musical version.

While this may be surprising in retrospect, you have to understand that the 1990s were a different, simpler era where movies like Aladdin and The Little Mermaid were actually successful at the box office, and CGI animation hadn’t ruined everyone’s fun by coming up with digital horrors like Space Chimps, Space Pets or Space Transvestite Hookers From Mars With Chainsaws For Legs And Lasers For Teeth (That last one, of course, the last movie credit for tragically-deceased actor Roy Schieder as Trixie Ferkids, the Martian cross-gender prostitute with a heart of gold and balls of steel, both literally). With the then-resurgence of the Disney Empire, animation was “hot” again… and the prospect of an animated Watchmen allowed for a cheaper epic than would’ve been possible in a live-action, special-effects bonanza at the time.

Within weeks of this project’s origin, songs were being written by the classic team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin and a script was slowly coming together from the watchful pen of Shane White, the man responsible for such movies as Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3. Casting included Joe Pesci as Rorschach (In this version, recast as an upbeat quipster with a breakout hit in the affecting ballad “My Face Keeps Changing (But My Heart Stays True)”), Cybill Shepherd as Silk Spectre and Robin Williams as Doctor Manhattan, but again, disaster struck the production when all of the lead animators were found murdered one morning under mysterious circumstances. Security video from the night before showed a large man with a long beard and longer hair breaking into the animation offices, but police have never been able to track this man down.

Fearing a curse had been placed on the movie, Fox quickly distanced themselves from it, even going so far as to release a statement to the press that it had never existed, that they had never worked with and never would willingly work with Elton John, that it as a corporate entity didn’t even like John’s music anyway, although it did have to admit that it had fond memories of the video for “I’m Still Standing” with everyone on the beach falling over. Some of the musical demos for the project have been leaked online, including the stirring closer “New York Smells Like Fish These Days (Alien Squid Aftermath).”

1994

Only two years later, famed director Terry Gilliam expressed interest in working on an adaptation of the comic. Sadly, as this was Terry Gilliam, no-one offered him any money to do so, and so he had to drop out and go and make 12 Monkeys instead. Everyone wins!

1999

As the world teetered on the brink of knowing that that whole Millennium Bug thing was really a bust but, still, wanted to take precautions just to be on the safe side – Yeah, right, like I was the only one – Paramount Pictures took up the rights to the comic for what they considered was a no-brainer: The Wachowski Brothers, fresh from the success of The Matrix, doing their own version of the Moore/Gibbons masterpiece.

The industry was aflame with the possibilities this pairing offered. By this point, Watchmen had gained a reputation for being unfilmable, but the Wachowski’s groundbreaking technical achievement of filming things in slow motion not only astonishing millions but also gave them the reputation for being the kind of groundbreaking mavericks who could film the unfilmable… in slow motion. Within days of the rumors breaking, actors were calling up offering their services, and the following castlist emerged: Keanu Reeves was to play Doctor Manhattan, while a computer generated Reeves was also to play Nite Owl, Rorschach and even Ozymandias, with some generic brunette playing Silk Spectre.

It was only when the Wachowskis handed in their first screenplay that alarm bells started to ring. Firstly, the superheroes from the comic were no longer superheroes, but leather-clad technological vigilantes out to save the world from unseen authority figures that controlled reality. While Paramount may have been willing to overlook that revision, it’s believed that they balked at the prospect of the 25 minute climactic sequence set in an underground rave that featured little more than computer generated Keanu Reeveses in sweaters dancing beside fetish-wear-clad women who would, eventually, form into the image of a giant alien vagina squid, Busby Berkeley-style, bringing about the end of the world as we knew it while some soon-to-be-dated techno music played on the soundtrack.

Within hours of the script being delivered to the studio, Paramount shut down the project permanently, and handed the rights back to Warner Bros.

2005

Flushed from the success of 300 and armed with foreknowledge of things to come from a trio of mystical women he had met while filming the sword-and-sandals epic, director Zack Snyder accepted the job of directing what seemed like the latest in a long series of doomed Watchmen productions. While all around him were claiming that this latest effort would be as unrealistic as all others, Snyder’s clever use of oracular intervention had already assured him that the worst troubles he had lying in wait were a short but public court scuffle over which studio actually owned the rights to the comic anyway and his far-off assassination from the one fan who just couldn’t forgive him for turning Tales of The Black Freighter into its own DVD cartoon, instead of releasing a six-hour-long cut of the movie that contained it. Admittedly, this last prediction had almost dissuaded him from taking the job, but then the oracles had assured him that this whole future-seein’ thing wasn’t always 100% reliable, and anyway, who wants to live forever, before cackling for seven solid minutes. Missing the unsubtle foreshadowing that his own life shared with his movies, Snyder naively believed the oracles, and signed on the dotted line.

As I write these words, it’s little over a week before Watchmen makes it to theaters, but that only makes it easier to say nice things about the soon-to-be-departed Mr. Snyder’s work on the movie. Sure, he may have edited things out and changed some pretty key elements of the plot, but it’s Hollywood, man. I’m even willing to forgive him the unnervingly glossy, unrealistic, way that everything looks in all the trailers, because… he got it made. Yes, the “it” that got made may not be Watchmen as you or I may have wanted to see it, but you only have to look at the amount of merchandise available for the movie – Watchmen Condoms? Really? – to know that it’s definitely a movie that’s definitely called Watchmen. And that takes some talent… or at least a good copyright lawyer.

So here’s to you, Mr. Snyder. May you enjoy the fruits of your labor before one of us gets so enraged that we have to kill you.