50 Greatest Movies Never Made

Remember that great scene in Starfleet Academy—you know, the sixth Star Trek movie—in which the young Cadet Spock, the school's first alien, endured racist taunts from his classmates, only to be defended by fellow student James Kirk? And remember that deeply affecting scene where the two meet again on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise? You don't? Well, maybe that's because Starfleet Academy was never actually filmed.

Author Chris Gore tells it in The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (New York: St. Martin's), a combination of "studio meddling, actors' egos, and petty Hollywood power plays... deprived us of what could have been the greatest Star Trek tale of all."

It's a neat idea for a book—a celebration of movies that might have been—and Lord knows there's no end of material, since what Gore calls "the alternate universe of unfinished cinema" is many times vaster than the mass of completed films. In fact, the figures he cites are pretty scary. Ultimately, 42,000 screenplays are registered each year with Gore's summary of the plot, but only 3,000 of them get written for director Billy Wilder. And of these, "fewer than 50 actually have been very funny anyway. Others actually made it get made."

Timegate

Another potential gem that never got made is Timegate, a sci-fi dinosaur adventure dreamed up by special effects designer, Jim Danforth. The story dealt with future vacationers who are transported back to the age of reptiles on a time-tripping dinosaur hunt. Things predictably go wrong, the time gate gets damaged, and in order to return to the future the group must journey through this primitive world to a distant place of rescue, battling various prehistoric monsters along the way.

From Gore's description, the special effects would probably have been fun: lots of painstakingly detailed miniature models and even a life-size "walking machine." (This was in the late 1970s, before computer animation made dinosaurs' movements smoother and more realistic, but also robbed them of a certain wonder). According to Danforth, “We created a warehouse full of esoteric props and future vehicles. We shot thousands of feet of second-unit background plates and high speed miniatures." Alas, what was intended to be a low-budget production grew more and more costly; eventually the studio, AIP pulled the plug. "The props," as author Gore reports, the officials "were thrown out for the taking."

Halted in the Idea Stage

Some of the projects Gore focuses on barely made it out of the idea stage, such as a Marx Brothers comedy involving the mob, the United Nations, and a scheme to steal four films. What's even scarier is how few of the ones onto celluloid, such as the famous 1936-1937 production of I, Claudius, with Charles Laughton in the title role. Set in ancient Rome, the film was never completed, largely because its leading lady, Merle Oberon, was injured in a car accident; but Gore quotes someone who, after viewing the existing footage, hailed Laughton's acting as "one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema."

Alien vs. Predator

One of the wildest movies on his list—if not necessarily the greatest—would have been Alien vs. Predator, which did actually get made in 2004, based on the comic book series that pitted these outer space horror icons against one another. The result? "Cool big-screen fighting between alien races," says Gore, smacking his lips. "That's what this kind of movie is all about." It seems only fitting that when the project was scrapped, its screenwriter, Peter Briggs, was hired to write another monster/monster death match, Freddy vs. Jason, merging the worlds of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Alfred Hitchcock

After reviewing a collection of Hollywood interviews, Alfred Hitchcock had once been hired to direct a film about the Titanic. Gore doesn't mention this project, but he does describe another Hitchcock nonstarter, The Blind Man, a thriller that the director - and North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman cooked up somewhere between Psycho and The Birds. James Stewart was to star as a pianist, blind since birth, who is given a corneal transplant and elects to spend his initial day of sight in a rather famous locale: “The picture takes place in Disneyland," reports Gore, "as the blind man, seeing for the first time in his life, discovers he has been given the eyes of a murdered man. He attempts to track down the killer, who in turn is trying to kill him." What doomed this project was a combination of creative indecision—Lehman appears to have lost confidence in the script-and a veto by Walt Disney himself, who, understandably, wasn't too keen on the notion of a killer stalking Disneyland.

Other Projects

Several other sci-fi projects make Gore's list, including The Disappearance—based on a Philip Wylie novel in which all the men on Earth find themselves trapped in one dimension, all the women in another—and Statical Planets, the brainchild of Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson. Statical was to be a witty parody of the sort of films Hodgson had ridiculed on MST3K, complete with 50s-style black-and-white photography and a filmmaking process he dubbed "Static-A-Matic," in which audiences were encouraged to shock themselves at designated moments by generating their own static electricity—a takeoff on the notorious stunt (was it ever really used?) in which producer William Castle claimed to have wired up theater seats during showings of The Tingler.

Like so many stories in the book, Statical Planets ends in frustration: "Unfortunately, financing issues prevented further production beyond the making of the trailer." Still, says Gore, the trailer alone had audiences squealing with delight.

Of course, virtually any unfinished film, like virtually any un-produced screenplay, might contain seeds of greatness. "Heard melodies are sweet," Keats reminds us, "but those unheard are sweeter"—because, quite simply, they exist only in our imagination. Similarly, imagination can turn a list of aborted motion picture projects into a pantheon of potential masterpieces. As Gore himself explains, "since they weren't made, they will always be great—no one will muck them up."

Nonetheless, he admits to being uneasy with the very word "greatest." "If I had my way," he confides, "I'd rather title this book something like The 50 Best, Coolest, Weirdest, Strangest, Wildest, Most Amazing, Most Fantastic, Most Stupendous, Most Remarkable, Most Incredible, Most Bizarre, and Potentially Greatest Movies That Never Happened."

If you think you are Hollywood movie aficionado, think again. No matter how many trivia contests you beat your friends at, Chris Gore's book is the definitive on movies never made. The who, what, where and when of masterpieces that never were. The 50 never-made films featured here aren't playing on Netflix and aren't available on Amazon. You can only read about them in The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. A must have book for the authentic film buff library.