| Re: Mario's Film Folly: The True Story Behind Hollywood's Biggest Gaming Blunder [message #378380 is a reply to message #368238] |
Mon, 17 December 2018 01:46  |
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Originally posted by: eurodance20023
tirsdag den 29. maj 2018 kl. 16.27.21 UTC+2 skrev Ubiquitous:
> For all their absurdity, the Super Mario Bros. games follow a
> straightforward template. An Italian plumber adventures in a magical
> land, fights evil monsters and rescues a princess. It’s simple, but
> Nintendo’s vibrant fairy tale could have been fertile ground for a
> Hollywood fantasy epic. Instead, when Super Mario Bros. released in
> 1993, it portrayed a version of Mario that was worlds away from
> Nintendo’s vision. The Mushroom Kingdom had been turned into a neon-lit
> cyberpunk city where dinosaurs had evolved into humans. Bowser was a
> leather-suited politician fascinated by mud baths. The iconic goombas
> had become eight-foot tall lizard warriors with shrunken heads. Super
> Mario Bros. stands as one of Hollywood’s worst adaptations, but the
> story behind the film is infinitely more bizarre than the one the movie
> tells.
>
> Fire Flower Sale
> By 1990, Super Mario Bros. was one of the biggest intellectual
> properties on the planet. Super Mario World had just released in Japan,
> and the face of Nintendo’s chubby plumber had been slapped on
> everything from T-shirts and comic books to cereal boxes. Mario’s name
> alone was worth millions. It didn’t take long for the motion picture
> industry to come knocking on Nintendo’s door.
>
> As always, Nintendo was cautious with its property. The publisher knew
> Super Mario Bros. didn’t have a deep narrative. How would a movie
> studio translate the simple formula into a 90-minute film? Producer
> Roland Joffé thought he could figure it out. Joffé’s Lightmotive
> production company was inexperienced, but Joffé had directed the
> Oscar-nominated films The Killing Fields and The Mission, which gave
> the studio some clout. Nintendo was intrigued by Joffé’s ideas, but it
> was more interested in the fact that Joffé had agreed to let Nintendo
> retain merchandising rights from the film. Joffé walked away with a $2
> million contract. In a rare moment for the character, Mario’s future
> was now partially out of Nintendo’s control.
>
> After securing the rights to the film, Lightmotive immediately set to
> work trying to sign high-level talent. The studio approached Danny
> DeVito to both direct the film and play Mario. Both Arnold
> Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton were approached for the role of King
> Koopa. All three passed on the project.
>
> According to Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Jeff Ryan,
> Tom Hanks briefly signed on to play Mario, but some executives thought
> that Hanks was asking for too much money, so they fired Hanks in favor
> of English thespian Bob Hoskins. Hoskins was hot off the success of
> films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Hook, and the producers felt
> that he would be a more bankable star. Within a matter of years, Tom
> Hanks would win Oscars for both Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, becoming
> one of Hollywood’s most respected actors. Hoskins is now best known for
> his television work.
>
> While Lightmotive continued its search for actors and directors, it
> commissioned the first of many scripts. Barry Morrow, one of the
> Academy Award-winning writers of Rain Man, took first crack at the
> plot, but his treatment was deemed too dramatic and the project was
> passed over to the writing team that had worked on The Flintstones and
> Richie Rich.
>
> This version of the script was more in line with Mario’s roots. Mario
> and Luigi traveled to a magical land reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz
> and Alice in Wonderland. In this world, the evil King Koopa – an actual
> green lizard king – had kidnapped a Princess named Hildy and made her
> his bride, so that he could access the magical Crown of Invincibility.
> The Mario brothers and their sidekick Toad set off on a quest to rescue
> the princess and prevent Koopa from getting his hands on the artifact.
>
> This script was likely the closest the film would ever get to emulating
> the playful world imagined in Nintendo’s games. However, Lightmotive
> had already signed a directorial team to the project, and these
> visionaries would take the film down some wild rabbit holes.
>
> Scripting Disaster
> Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel didn’t have many movie
> credits to their names. In fact, the husband and wife team had only
> directed one other film, a critical and commercial bomb called D.O.A..
> The duo cut their teeth directing commercials for Coca-Cola and
> Hardee’s restaurants, eventually finding small success after creating
> the television series Max Headroom. Lightmotive loved Max Headroom’s
> zany vibe and felt that Morton and Jankel had the right imagination for
> a film like Super Mario Bros.
>
> Morton and Jankel’s vision for the film was much darker than the
> Nintendo game series. They wanted their film to take place in an
> alternate reality version of New York, a place called Dinohatten. After
> an asteroid struck Earth 65 million years ago, all of the planet’s
> dinosaurs had been banished to a dystopian version of our world, but
> the two realities were still connected by a portal under New York. As
> the eons passed, the dinosaurs slowly evolved into humanoids and grew
> to hate the mammals that blissfully walked around Earth prime.
>
> Nintendo’s hands were off the project by this point. “I met with the
> game’s designer [Shigeru Miyamoto] very briefly, like for a half an
> hour meeting or something, but that was about it really,” director
> Rocky Morton told us. “Nintendo let us do whatever we wanted. They just
> put a crushing deadline on the project. The movie had to be made by a
> certain date, otherwise there were all these financial penalties, which
> added a lot of extra stress to the project.”
>
> As the production rushed toward principal photography, the directors
> and producers struggled to agree on a script to match the movie’s new
> direction. More rewrites were issued. One action-packed treatment
> seemed inspired by Die Hard. The script itself contained a scene in
> which Bruce Willis could make a cameo, scurrying through the air ducts
> above King Koopa’s office. Another script featured Mad Max-style death
> races. It seemed that the Super Mario Bros. film was pulling
> inspiration from everything except the game series that shared its
> name.
>
> Double Vision
> By mid-1992, production was well under way. Holding to the director’s
> inspiration for a darker film, Lightmotive agreed to hire the art
> director who worked on Blade Runner to transform an abandoned cement
> plant in North Carolina into a cyberpunk wonderland. Campaign posters
> portrayed Dennis Hopper’s version of King Koopa kissing babies. Street
> vendors served kabobs of flame-broiled lizard. A club called the Boom
> Boom Bar advertised hot blood cocktails. Electric cars trailed sparks
> as they buzzed through the city’s main artery.
>
> “I wanted the film to be more sophisticated,” Morton said.. “I wanted
> parents to really get into it. At that time, there was a very hardcore
> movement against video games, and a lot of anti-video games sentiment.
> I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents
> interested in video games. It’s completely different now, but back then
> it was taboo to make a movie based on a video game.”
>
> Not everyone shared Morton and Jankel’s vision for the film. The studio
> was expecting a lighthearted kids film, and most of the cast and crew
> had signed on with similar expectations. The tensions between these two
> visions began to tear apart the production. The studio felt that the
> movie was too dark, pressuring Morton and Jankel to lighten the tone.
> Lightmotive brought in the writer from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
> to write yet another version of the script.
>
> “We were forbidden to work with that writer,” Morton recalled. “And
> that was only a couple of weeks before we went into principle
> photography. I’d already had the set built and a lot of characters with
> prosthetics had already been made, so that script came in and a lot of
> it didn’t match what we’d already started working on.”
>
> By this point, at least nine writers had worked on the film, and
> rewrites would continue long after the cameras started rolling. The
> script ballooned into a rainbow of confusion as the production crew was
> continually handed new color-coded daily edits.
>
> “The script had probably been rewritten five or six times by the time I
> arrived here,” Dennis Hopper told the Chicago Tribune back in 1992. “I
> don’t really bother with it anymore. I just go in and do it scene by
> scene. I figure it’s not going to hurt my character.”
>
> The Flying Squirrel Show
> Despite Morton and Jankel’s vision for a movie that sounded nothing
> like Nintendo’s series, the duo attentively worked in several video
> game references. Yoshi appeared as King Koopa’s pet, and spray-painted
> SNES Super Scopes functioned as portable devolution guns during the
> film’s climax. One key reference almost didn’t make the cut; Morton and
> Jankel didn’t want the Mario brothers to appear in their classic red
> and green overalls. They fought with the producers about the costumes
> for weeks but finally consented, allowing Mario and Luigi to don their
> familiar outfits about three fourths of the way through the film.
>
> From the crew’s point of view, Morton and Jankel were micromanaging
> every facet of the production. At one point, Morton allegedly poured
> coffee on an extra because he didn’t think the actor looked dirty
> enough for the scene. According to a 1992 Chicago Tribune article, the
> crew began calling the directors derogatory names behind their back.
> One of their favorites was “Rocky and Annabel, the Flying Squirrel
> Show.”
>
> Filming was scheduled to last 10 weeks, but it slowly stretched into
> 15. Everyone had different ways of dealing with the frustrating
> production schedule. John Leguizamo, who had been cast as Luigi,
> started drinking. In his biography, Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All
> the Rest of My Hollywood Friends: My Life, Leguizamo describes how he
> started doing shots of scotch with Hoskins between scenes. During a
> scene in which Leguizamo was driving a van, the actor was reportedly
> drunk and braked too hard, causing the sliding door to smash shut on
> Hoskins’ hand. During certain sequences of the film, Hoskins can
> briefly be seen wearing a pink cast.
>
> Other members of the crew saw the chaotic production as an opportunity.
> According to SMB Movie Archive, Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson, who
> played Koopa’s henchmen Spike and Iggy, started writing their own
> dialogue, and even convinced the studio to film a rap scene starring
> them that was ultimately cut from the theatrical release. At one point
> in the original script, Koopa had their characters devolved into
> goombas, but the actors sold the directors on the idea that their
> characters should be further evolved to become super smart instead.
> Plot changes like this weren’t just common – they were happening on a
> daily basis.
>
> “They were like a double act,” Morton said of Stevens and Edson. “They
> were young and enthusiastic and inventive, and they definitely came up
> with stuff for their characters. You know, there were flaws in the
> script that had to be plugged and worked on while we were shooting, so
> there was a lot of rewriting and ad-libbing to try and make sense of
> everything.”
>
> Over budget, behind schedule, and managing a cast and crew that was
> either drunk, working off-script, or completely belligerent, Super
> Mario Bros. had run completely off rails. But this train hadn’t wrecked
> yet.
>
> Dropping the Bob-Omb
> The end of Super Mario Bros. was a hack job. Morton and Jankel had
> hoped to film an epic battle sequence on the Brooklyn Bridge.
> Storyboards were drawn up in which the two realities would start to
> merge as Mario faced off against Bowser on the iconic structure. Mario
> eventually won after dropping a Bob-Omb down Koopa’s throat then
> kicking him into the river before he exploded. The scene would never be
> filmed. The film’s producers were tired of spending money on the
> production. Instead, Koopa was blasted with the Super Scope guns and
> reduced to a primordial sludge.
>
> “You have to remember that CGI technology was a lot cruder back then,”
> Morton explained. “It was very expensive and hard to do, and we were
> running out of money, so we couldn’t do a lot of the elaborate effects
> and stuff that I wanted to do.”
>
> After principle photography ended, the film’s producers tried to cut
> Morton and Jankel out of the picture. Lightmotive had gotten two other
> production companies to buy into the film, and now there were three
> sets of producers that had money at stake if the movie bombed. Many
> producers felt that the film needed more action, so a second unit set
> out to film a couple extra action sequences. Morton and Jankel weren’t
> invited to those shoots, but that wasn’t the only thing the directing
> duo was shut out from.
>
> “I was locked out of the editing room,” Morton said. “I had to get the
> DGA [Director’s Guild of America union] to come and help me get back
> into the editing room. I tried to get the editor to cut it digitally,
> but they refused. They wanted to edit on Moviola and Steenbeck
> machines, so the process was laboriously slow, which didn’t help us get
> the special effect cut in on time.”
>
> Super Mario Bros. released to theaters on May 28, 1993. The film cost
> $48 million to make and grossed less than $21 million. Going up against
> hit summer films like Mrs. Doubtfire, The Fugitive, and Jurassic Park,
> the movie probably never had a chance to make back its money. Even Tom
> Hanks’ new film, Sleepless in Seattle, out-grossed Mario by $200
> million. No one was happy.
>
> The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Bros.,” Hoskins told The
> Guardian in an interview back in 2007. “It was a f---in’ nightmare. The
> whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team
> directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many
> weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! F---in’ nightmare.
> F---in’ idiots.”
>
> “From everyone’s point of view, the film was a mess,” Morton admitted.
> “It just got rushed into production with a script that had been written
> two weeks before principle photography, and which had no input from
> either Annabel or myself. Most of the actors had signed up on the old
> script, not the new script, so it was very hard to coax them into this
> new one. I don’t think anyone was really happy with the end result.”
>
> A lot of excuses can be made for Super Mario Bros. It was made during a
> different era. No one had tried to make a big-budget video game movie
> before. Video game companies didn’t know how much input they should
> have on the production. And special effects technology limited
> directors’ abilities to portray some of the more fantastical elements
> often found in a game. However, it’s hard to escape the fact that Super
> Mario Bros. was a bad film – a byproduct of a hundred bad choices and
> unfortunate mishaps. Super Mario Bros. should stand as a testament for
> the wrong way to make a video game movie. Maybe the industry will
> figure out how to do it right some day.
>
> --
> Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
> have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.
Im having so many mails
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