Q: How did that sort of affect the way you approached this? You didn’t like the way Dungeons and Dragons turned out. Now you’re coming out with your next film, how do you make sure that you do like this one?
Solomon: I wrote this one. So that made it a lot easier for me. I mean Dungeons had a lot of stories. I know I don’t really talk about it all that much but it has a lot of stories behind it because I got those rights when I was like nineteen or twenty and that company changed ownership many times. And when I originally got them, being so young with no track record, I gave them director approval on the rights agreement, I gave them script approval on the rights agreement. Things a studio would never, ever give.
Q: The company at that time was –
Solomon: TSR. And the woman that owned it was like a trust fund baby and she got this company for like, I believe you know, a couple hundred grand from Gary Gygax because he spent it on some coke binge or something – as the story goes. I can’t validate if that would casbe true or not. But that’s how the story goes. So she picked it up, and when I went in to her and I came up with this whole thing, when we did the script for example, she was like, ‘I want to make toys.’ I’m like, ‘Lady, your audience doesn’t want to buy toys. That’s not who the D&D audience is. You gotta make a different film.’ She didn’t care.
And what happened was, you know, long story short, you know. I got, you know, Jim Cameron to agree to do it at one point in 93. She sits at the Bel Air Hotel Restaurant [with Cameron], she folds her arms, she looks at him and says – its 93 – she says, ‘What are your qualifications to direct this film?’ I was like, ‘OK, Jim, please don’t kill me right now. I know about your temper, please don’t do it. Ok.’
Look, at twenty-three as a producer, I originally only intended to produce Dungeons and Dragons. That was the thing, I could get the rights, go to Hollywood, get a big director like Jim Cameron, hey I brought her Francis Coppola, I brought her Renny Harlin in the early 90’s. At that point these people were hot, and she turned them all down, she had the approval.
So then she lost her company – what a surprise – about three years later and Wizards of the Coast bought it. The guy who ran Wizards of the Coast stepped into it like a lucky naughty word, you know, he’d gotten Magic: The Gathering, made a ton of money really quickly, bought the Dungeons and Dragons company and at that point I had gotten involved with Joel Silver. We had rewritten the script to be a good script that should be D&D, we were attaching a filmmaker and we had it financed for a decent amount of money. And that guy came in and he started a lawsuit with us just as we were about to shoot. So financing, everything all falls through, we have to fight with these guys. We settle with them because their lawsuit was bogus and we’d been working on it for six years. But part of the settlement was we had to go within a certain amount of months and start production on the movie or we’d lose our rights entirely, that was just the easy way out because who gets into this to fight a lawsuit.
At that point my investors had put a lot of money in, they said, ‘You know this movie better than anybody. You’re directing.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t want to direct this movie.’ And then, part of the settlement was, I got stuck having to do the script that she originally approved many years earlier. And they did it on purpose because they wanted the whole thing to fail. I was like, ‘You guys are fools. It’s your property, why do you want to do this?’ They didn’t care. The guy just had blinders on. So, whatever, we had millions in, time in, everything else, we had obligations to people so that’s it. That’s not how you want to direct your first film. My original plan was, I’m going to produce this, start to make a name in Hollywood, learn from a big director and then go to direct my first movie.
OK, all said and done, and there were a lot of problems afterwards, all said and done, great learning experience. What did I bring back to it? American Haunting. Looking at it, I know what I did wrong personally. I knew what I wasn’t in control of personally Dungeons and Dragons. So I tried to learn as much as I possibly could.
