Lost Soul
A documentary about how "The Island of Dr. Moreau" became such a cluster-muck.
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014). Grade: B-
There’s a whole mini-genre of documentaries about failed movies; ones that were never finished, or ones that were finished aftrr going horribly wrong.
An early entry is the 1965 BBC The Epic That Never Was, about a 1937 adaptation of I, Claudius, featuring Charles Laughton as a meek-then-mad Roman emperor remembering the behavior of mad-then-uttery bats**t other Roman emperors. It was directed by Josef Sternberg, a famed visual stylist of the time, and co-starred Merle Oberon, a famed beauty of the time. Sternberg and Laughton hated each other, the script was a mess, Oberon got in a car crash (she recovered), everything was way too expensive and went all to heck. As Pauline Kael put it, “from the look of the footage which is included, the world did not lose a masterpiece.”
(I agree. The Epic That Never Was is included as a DVD extra on the 1976 BBC I, Claudius, which we watched over Christmas, because that’s the kind of thing that we do over Christmas. Nephew, keep Christmas in your own way, and allow me to keep it in mine.)
There’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, about kinda-loony director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970s attempt to film the famous Frank Herbert novel (which is OK, but way overpraised). Jodorowsky had Alien conceptual artist H.R. Gieger on board, Pink Floyd to do the score, and a cast including Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson. The documentary’s very entertaining, because you come away from it absolutely sure that shutting this thing down was the sensible decision to make; it would have been an absolutely epically stupid disaster. Then, on the other hand, you wish it had been made, so you could watch such an epically stupid disaster.
There’s Lost in La Mancha, about director Terry Gilliam’s on-again, off-again attempts to film Don Quixote; specifically, a production that was shot down in 2000. When you see images of French actor Jean Rochefort in costume as the title character, he looks absolutely perfect for the part; he became badly hurt and could not continue filming. You’re not so sure about Johhny Depp’s suitability for Sancho Panza. Gilliam would evenually release a different version of Don Quixote in 2018. It has its moments, yet it’s really all about how much Hollywood doesn’t appreciate Terry Gilliam, Great Genius. I couldn’t help but think, “get over yourself, pal.”
“Get over yourself” is also my reaction to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about all the troubles on the set of Apocalypse Now. Typhoons, a heart attack (Martin Sheen survived), Marlon Brando being completely unhinged, budget overruns, you name it. In the documentary, Coppola is seen saying “this film isn’t about Vietnam, this film IS Vietnam,” which exemplifies everything wrong with Apocalypse Now. It’s purportedly a movie about the horrors of war that’s actually in love with the spectacle of those horrors. It impressed me at age 17 or so and it mostly disgusts me now. The documentary’s interesting because you’re watching Coppola, under enormous stress, basically letting his ego consume what was once a gifted artist’s soul.
Lost: The Doomed Journey is a somewhat different film than those others, because Richard Stanley has some different character flaws than those other directors. He’s a real oddball, for sure, yet he doesn’t come across as an incredibly pompous fellow. Maybe a bit of a poseur, but then, everyone in Hollywood is. Maybe he’s a little on the spectrum, too.
Stanley had made a low-budget Terminator knock-off called Hardware in 1990; critics were divided, but the movie developed a devoted cult following. Stanley’s dream project was to adapt H.G. Welles’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau for the screen; he disliked the 1932 Charles Laughton version for not being true to the book, and hated the 1977 Burt Lancaster version for being just plain bad. (Lost Soul shows a few images from that version, it looks terrible; I enjoyed the 1932 one.)
A few execs at New Line Cinema liked Stanley’s script, but weren’t too sure about Stanley himself; the proposed budget was way bigger than anything he’d ever done. Stanley somehow managed to finagle a meeting with Marlon Brando, who absolutely loved his ideas, and became Stanley’s biggest supporter on the project. (Stanley got some people he knew in a coven to perform a self-cutting pagan Magick ritual before his Brando meeting; perhaps that helped?) Bruce Willis and James Woods were on board in major supporting roles; makeup wizard Stan Winston was designing the costumes.
In pre-production, all sorts of unpredictable disasters started happening. One of Brando’s adult children died. Bruce Willis had to leave the film for personal reasons; he was replaced by Val Kilmer, who demanded a limited shooting schedule. That led to Woods’s departure, replaced by Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow. Massive flooding tore the heck out of the sets (in tropical Northeast Australia).
Stanley seems to have basically retreated into himself, being overwhelmed by the stress of it all. He wouldn’t, or more likely psychologically couldn’t, show up to production meetings. Brando was still unavailable. Rob Morrow called his agent, called the studio heads, everyone he could think of to get him the heck out of there. Eventually, almost right after shooting began, Stanley was replaced with veteran John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate). Frankenheimer hated the script and ordered a complete rewrite. By the time Brando showed up, the hastily-rewritten script was a godforsaken mess. And Val Kilmer was busy being a bully to everyone.
As one of the cast members put it, she was supposed to be on this film for three weeks; it ended up being six months. Nobody’s base pay got any bigger, but they were all getting a huge per diem and expensive hotel rooms, so why not hang around and drink and do a ton of drugs and have sex with everybody else? Doesn’t sound too bad. (Except hanging out in hot weather all day in heavy latex costumes, that part sounds really bad.)
I think what happened here is that Richard Stanley sort of bullshi**ted his way into a job he was unqualified for, and panicked when he realized it was too much for him. No shame in that! Hollywood’s full of self-promoting B.S. artists; they’re the majority of filmmakers. What New Line should have done (as one producer acknowledges here) is surround Stanley with people who DID have considerable big-budget experience, not undermine him out of hopes he would quit. And by hiring John Frankenheimer, they replaced inexperience with inflexibility. Frankenheimer should have realized this was a mess and just finished it as quickly as possible. Instead, he got cranky and started being a jerk. One actor had a crew member drive her all the way to the OTHER coast of Australia, then was warned her career would be ruined if she didn’t come back. So she flew back.
It’s sure a pretty interesting mess to watch unfold, here. Brando thought the new script was garbage and didn’t bother learning any lines. Per David Thewlis (who replaced Rob Morrow), Brando had lines fed to him via an earpiece, and it sometimes bled over to other channels; he’d “‘be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, “There's a robbery at Woolworths.’”
Brando took a liking to novelty actor Nelson de la Rosa (one of the world’s smallest humans, at 2’4”), and had the crew make special costumes/minature props for De la Rosa that mimicked the costumes/props Brando was using. Off-set, De la Rosa had the habit of punching male cast/crewmembers in the balls. This was later the inspiration for Austin Powers’s Mini-Me. (While Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez believed De la Rosa brought him good luck in the team’s 2004 playoff run:)
This isn’t a big-budget documentary; the score is a little junky. What director David Gregory does here, though, is more interesting — to me — than some of those other documentaries about failed/chaotic film productions. Because those documentaries all assume that the finished film would have been incredible (and that Apocalypse Now was incredible). This doesn’t make that claim for Stanley’s Dr. Moreau. At best, the movie might have been original and interesting, it was hardly likely to be any kind of classic.
It’s hard not to empathize with Stanley here. The way that New Line promised to make his movie yet secretly wanted to fire him all along, keeping only his script. Meaning his longtime dream project would be taken away (as it eventually was). And then the way they didn’t exactly, fire him, as that would have contractually meant paying him off. Instead, they kept paying him to stay in Australia and stay away from the set, hoping he’d outright quit so they could dock his salary. At one point Stanley snuck onto the set, got into a spare creature costume, and hung around in the background of scenes! Oddball that Stanley is, you feel bad for the way the studio jerked him around.
Stanley directed a 2019 adaptation of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story, Color Out of Space. Starring Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson and… Tommy Chong? With a cast member listed as “G-Spot the Cat”? I’m probably gonna have to see that one just for the heckofit.