Mick Garris Says These Unmade Scripts Are Among His Biggest Regrets
Max Weinstein
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“If you’re a screenwriter, there’s no way you’ll have everything you love produced,” says Mick Garris.
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On the latest “Ask Mick Anything” edition of Post Mortem with Mick Garris, the filmmaker and podcast host issued this warning to a listener who wanted to know which of his unmade projects are his favorites. And a couple of scripts in particular, Garris jokes, are “two of my rooms in the Heartbreak Hotel.”
The first that came to mind? “A four-hour version of [Stephen King and Peter Straub’s] The Talisman. I had written the screenplay, Steven Spielberg was producing, and Straub and King [were] part of the production team,” Garris reveals.
Garris explains that although this team—which also included producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall—was “enthusiastic about the script, the above-the-line costs were so high and ABC was in such dire financial straits. Their ratings had sunk to rock bottom and they just couldn’t afford to do it.”
A second, even more painful “what-if” for Garris: “There’s a script that Richard Matheson and I wrote together called Red Sleep… a vampire movie. It sold for $750,000 and it was gonna go, but they decided, ‘Well, we wanna go through development,’ and they literally had another 12 writers on it.”
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“For a while, John Landis was going to direct it,” he continues. “There was a green light… then the green light turned yellow, and they had John do his other vampire movie[, Innocent Blood].” By the time their team had gone through the development phase, Garris says there was no way they could make back the $2 to 3 million they had put it into the script alone.
Post Mortem producer Joe Russo, who worked with Garris on their 2018 anthology feature, Nightmare Cinema, notes that this is the way many projects die on the vine. “What most people don’t realize is that the more development money gets thrown at a script, the harder it becomes to eventually make that thing,” Russo says. “To go to someone and say, ‘Hey, I want to have you buy this project from me’ and already have millions of dollars against it… it becomes an impossible task.”
You can listen to the most recent AMA episode of Post Mortem with Mick Garris below.
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