“Blackhawk”
As much as comic books have informed his films, Spielberg didn’t actually get around to directly adapting one until 2011’s “The Adventures Of Tintin.” It could have been very different, though, had he made a once-mooted adaptation of DC Comics property “Blackhawk.” Originally published in 1941 by Quality Comics (with Will Eisner among the creators), the characters were an international group of pilots, led by Polish Air Force pilot Blackhawk, who wreaked vengeance on the Nazis (and after the war, other supervillains too). The characters languished somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s, cancelled initially in 1968, then revived in January 1976 only to be scrapped again, but Spielberg appeared to be thinking of a movie adaptation sometime in the 1980s, and planned to cast his “1941” actor Dan Aykroyd in the starring role. In fact, the film project seemed to help revive the property, as Mark Evanier, who penned the 1982 reboot of the comic, later explained. “I believe what happened was that Steve Spielberg was interested in possibly doing something with ‘Blackhawk’ and somebody even mentioned that Dan Aykroyd wanted to play the character… so suddenly DC thought it was advantageous to have a comic back on the schedule.” It doesn’t seem like the project got very far — Evanier describes it as “pie in the sky,” but it was an intriguing proposition nonetheless. Years later, he also considered another superhero project, an adaptation of Rob Liefeld’s “ The Mark,” which would have starred first Will Smith, then Tom Cruise.
“After School”/“Growing Up/I’ll Be Home
Like all great auteurs, even Spielberg’s biggest budget movies have felt deeply personal, but the director has so far shied away from naked, or even veiled, autobiography. Which isn’t to say he hasn’t considered it. On the set of ‘Close Encounters,’ Francois Truffaut urged Spielberg to make an American equivalent to the director’s own “Small Change,” saying, “You must make a movie about keeds. You must stop all this big stuff and make a movie about keeds! If it’s the last thing you do!” As a result, the director approached Bobs Gale and Zemeckis, whose script “ 1941” he was already prepping, to write a movie with the wide brief of being about children, that he could shoot quickly on a low budget before their epic war comedy could be filmed. Announced in 1978 as “a personal story of his own young adulthood,” the film was a foul-mouthed, R-rated comedy about 12-year-olds called “After School,” which Spielberg approved of. “I don’t want to make a movie about children that’s dimples or cuteness,” he said at the time. “It’s my first vendetta film. I’m going to get back at about twenty people I’ve always wanted to get back at.” The film (retitled at some point “Growing Up”) was set to shoot in May 1978 with a budget of just $1.5 million, but when Caleb Deschanel, recruited to shoot the film, called the script “disgusting,” Spielberg got cold feet and backed out. Which isn’t to say he abandoned the idea of something more personal altogether: as recently as 1999 he talked about a project called “I’ll Be Home,” about his own childhood, written by sister Anne (who also wrote “Big”), but also mentioned his hesitations, telling the New York Times, “My big fear is that my mom and dad won’t like it and will think it’s an insult and won’t share my loving yet critical point of view about what it was like to grow up with them.”
The Lost Indiana Jones Movies
Spielberg’s biggest and longest-running series, with four movies directed by him (and, he said this week, potentially a fifth on the way), Indiana Jones has seen more than one discarded script or premise over the years, particularly in the nearly-twenty year gap between the third and fourth films. Some of them even pre-date “The Last Crusade.” After “Temple Of Doom,” George Lucas wrote an outline for a script largely set in Africa and involving a search for the Fountain Of Youth, with a stowaway student, a female archaeologist, and a 200-year-old pygmy. Chris Columbus was hired to write it in 1985, with the second draft called “Indiana Jones And The Lost City Of Sun Wu King,” “Romancing The Stone” writer Diane Thomas was also working on a third movie that would have been set mostly in a haunted house, but she tragically died in a car accident before work was finished. Development on a fourth movie began in the 1990s, with “The Fugitive” scribe Jeb Stuart the first to write a script, which included elements from the finished film, including aliens and the Soviets as bad guys. Titled “Indiana Jones And The Saucermen From Mars,” the script (later worked on by ‘Last Crusade’’s Jeffrey Boam) had a very different story, however, with Indy set to marry a woman who disappears on the wedding day, leading to a plot involving flying saucers and cameos from many early characters from the series. Other writers including M. Night Shyamalan and Stephen Gaghan were considered at various points before Frank Darabont wrote a well-regarded script called “ Indiana Jones And the City Of The Gods,” with the villains being ex-Nazis hiding out in South America, but Lucas apparently didn’t like it. The script was eventually redrafted to include many elements from “Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull,” including the crystal skull and multiple set pieces (though no Shia LaBeouf character) — oddly Darabont never got screen credit of any kind.
“Lindbergh”
One of the most famous figures of 20th Century America, Charles Lindbergh was the subject of Billy Wilder’s “The Spirit Of St. Louis” in 1957, but while that film depicted Lindbergh’s record-breaking famous flight from Long Island to Paris, it didn’t show the darker sides of the national hero, from the kidnap and murder of his infant son, to his fascist sympathies, racism, and anti-semitism. As such, it’s surprising that no one’s made a biopic of him in a more warts-and-all manner, though Spielberg did in fact try: in 1998, he picked up the rights through DreamWorks to A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer-winning biography “Lindbergh.” The project was seemingly a priority for a while, but a year later, the director was telling the New York Times that, having made “Schindler’s List,” and his ongoing work with the Shoah Foundation, had given him second-thoughts about making a movie about an anti-semite. “They’ve given me more of a moral responsibility to make sure I’m not putting someone else’s agenda in front of the most important agenda, which is trying to create tolerance,” he said. “One of the reasons I’ve considered not being the director is that I didn’t know very much about him until I read Scott Berg’s book and I read it only after I purchased it, and I think it’s one of the greatest biographies I’ve ever read, but his America First and his anti-Semitism bothers me to my core,
and I don’t want to celebrate an anti-Semite unless I can create an understanding of why he felt that way. Because sometimes the best way to prevent discrimination is to understand the discriminator.” The project fell away, though Dustin Lance Black has been working on a TV adaptation for Leonardo DiCaprio in the last year or so.