D&D General [What if?] John Boorman directs Gygax's D&D movie

[Sacrosanct]

Dredging up the old TSR era bad management decisions in the other thread made me wonder something. When Gary heard Kevin Blume was destroying the company (spending company money to bring up a shipwreck? Really?), he left LA and headed back to try to correct things. While in LA, he did the D&D cartoon (which we all know about), but was in negotiations for a D&D movie. Orsen Wells agreed to star in it. Boorman was gonna direct it.

So....in this what if world. What if Kevin Blume wasn't blowing money, and Gary never left Hollywood. What if a D&D movie did get made.

Would it be like Boorman's Zardoz, or more like his work with Deliverance and Excalibur? Would it have been possible that the official D&D movie would have been good, and not the disaster that we ended up getting in 2000 (I think around then)?

 

[LordEntrails]

A crap shoot? Obviously its all speculation, even with a killer production crew and cast a movie can just sink itself (for a thousand reasons). And totally unheard of crew can put together a one-off one-hit wonder and never do anything worthy after that.

But...
Well, I don't think Gary had the refinement, knowledge, or ability to pull off a masterpiece. But, a D&D movie does not need to be Master Piece Theater to be a great movie. I think there would have been about a 70% chance of Excalibur, and 30% chance of something not worthy of a footnote

I imagine it would not have been as refined as Excalibur, probably a bit darker. Maybe like Dragonslayer? Something with better chance of being a cult hit than a blockbuster.

 

[Sacrosanct]

A crap shoot? Obviously its all speculation, even with a killer production crew and cast a movie can just sink itself (for a thousand reasons). And totally unheard of crew can put together a one-off one-hit wonder and never do anything worthy after that.

But...
Well, I don't think Gary had the refinement, knowledge, or ability to pull off a masterpiece. But, a D&D movie does not need to be Master Piece Theater to be a great movie. I think there would have been about a 70% chance of Excalibur, and 30% chance of something not worthy of a footnote

I imagine it would not have been as refined as Excalibur, probably a bit darker. Maybe like Dragonslayer? Something with better chance of being a cult hit than a blockbuster.

While what you say is totally technically true, we can sort of make some guesses based on who is working on it. Boorman and Orson Wells? That gives me some hope that it could have been decent. Of course, writing is pretty important...

But maybe I'll take this as a chance to take another shot at Kevin Blume for denying us a movie that would have been better than the garbage we got later

 

[LordEntrails]

That gives me some hope that it could have been decent

Hence my 70% assessment of 'success' Couldn't find any statistics of how many movies are a success (or break even?) But a WAG is 50%, based on nothing more than a random number!

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Welles was to do the narration parts only. William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Bridge Too Far, The Princess Bride, etc) wrote a, surprisingly, lifeless first-pass script for it (still held by the Gygax Estate).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It would have made Hawk the Slayer look like a masterpiece. Gygax can't write a decent story and Boorman's pretentious remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (with most of the jokes removed) was already looking dated (it was later when it came back into fashion).

 

[Zardnaar]

It would have made Hawk the Slayer look like a masterpiece. Gygax can't write a decent story and Boorman's pretentious remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (with most of the jokes removed) was already looking dated (it was later when it came back into fashion).

This.

Would bet on low budget B grade at best without the charms of Krull or whatever.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Were it the Goldman script about Tom Boyman, I suspect it would've been a DOA lump. We'd watch it now with the same frame of mind we watch Mazes & Monsters. As much as I love Boorman's Excalibur, I don't think any director could've salvaged that script.

 

[Sacrosanct]

It would have made Hawk the Slayer look like a masterpiece. Gygax can't write a decent story and Boorman's pretentious remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (with most of the jokes removed) was already looking dated (it was later when it came back into fashion).

Huh? Are you referring to Excalibur? That was a great movie. Even if you get past the part where he cast his own daughter to do a nude sex scene (which was creepy), the movie itself was great. And a couple years after being tagged for a D&D movie, he made Hope and Glory. A film nominated for best picture, director, and screenplay in the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and BAFTA. He had also made Deliverance prior. So Zardoz aside, it doesn't mean the D&D movie would be a sinker automatically.

 

[ART!]

...Boorman's pretentious remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (with most of the jokes removed) was already looking dated (it was later when it came back into fashion).

Yeah, that's an...unexpected take.

Even at the time I could tell it was "low-budget", but only by the standards of then-recent genre hits, but "pretentious remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail"?

I mean...it's not a remake, but I'm fairly confident you know that.

As for "pretentious", that's not a charge I've ever heard anyone level at that movie. It takes the source material seriously and is probably more faithful than any adaptation of Le Morte dArthur before or since (I don't know that anyone else has really tried), but is it "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed" (a quickly-Googled definition of "pretentious")? Not that I can tell - they were just trying to make a serious adaptation of a legendary/mythic story.


More precisely on-topic: given how less-than-stellar most fantasy movies of that era were, a D&D movie would most likely have fallen in a similar range. But the value of those movies isn't really judged by mainstream award-winning movie standards: they're popcorn flicks.

I wonder if it would have been more..."goofy", like Krull or Hawk the Slayer, more "serious/dark" like Dragonslayer or Excalibur, or more classic adventure stuff like the old Sinbad movies...