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

[Sacrosanct]

Boorman's general skill isn't the problem. His suitability for a project like this is. I mean, look at his other projects from this era.

I did. I mentioned twice already how right after this he made a movie that was nominated for Academy awards, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards. Wouldn't a movie he made in the mid 80s be considered the same era as the mid 80s when Gary approached him and he agreed to do it?

Also you somewhat slanderous if amusing scuttlebutt list of "wasted on set" people misses the point - Welles was giving a lot of phoned in and terrible performances and had no physicality by that point. He'd have been bad in anything but a cameo.

He was slotted to do narration. Which he did pretty well in History of the World part I and the voice of Unicron in Transformers the Movie (and he died right after doing that, before the film actually was released)

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

He did have a great voice, though he was pretty broken down at that point.

As I noted, he was to do the narration parts only. Great voice for that.

True. I had not heard about Gary Oldman in Dracula. Also, "in everything he did" could probably be applied to the glorious Peter O'Toole as well.

Notably absent from that list:

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo in Super Mario Bros. Can't say I blame them, either.

To be fair, just because he was drunk during this ad doesn't mean he would have been a horrible actor in a movie. Other notable actors who were wasted on set?

• Margot Robbie in "The Wolf of Wall Street" ...
• Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in "Fight Club" ...
• Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in "Black Swan" ...
• Jennifer Lawrence in "Catching Fire" ...
• Daniel Radcliffe in "Harry Potter" ...
• Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music"
• Spencer Tracy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"
• Peter O'Toole in "Laurence of Arabia"
• Billy Bob Thorton in "Bad Santa"
• Gary Oldman in "Bram Stokers Dracula"
• Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now"
• Richard Burton in everything he did

 

[Sacrosanct]

He did have a great voice, though he was pretty broken down at that point.

Just a couple years prior, he won a Grammy award for his voice work, so I wouldn't consider that "broken down"

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo in Super Mario Bros. Can't say I blame them, either.

I omitted them on purpose. Because that's also not a great example of being a good actor while drunk

 

[Paul Farquhar]

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.

Maybe, but a lot of people think the Python film is a parody of the Boorman film (it was, of course, released about 5 years earlier).

As for "pretentious", that's not a charge I've ever heard anyone level at that movie.

It's been said by more people than me, including professional reviewers. The first Conan film also verges on the pretentious, at least in comparison to it's pulp source material.

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.

Sometimes "faithful" to something from another culture or time becomes alien because of it's lack of sociological context. The original text was not trying for "mythic". It's just it's age (and Latin name) that makes it seem that way.

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...

I would rate Dragonslayer as quite goofy (or at least it has a lot of humour in it - it's uneven tone is one of it's faults) and Krull as both serious and dark.

Some of those Sinbad films I would rate pretty high.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I did. I mentioned twice already how right after this he made a movie that was nominated for Academy awards, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards. Wouldn't a movie he made in the mid 80s be considered the same era as the mid 80s when Gary approached him and he agreed to do it?

A reasonable question but no. As I said, look at his other work, not the plaudits but the actual work. The plaudits given to early and mid '80s movies mostly reflect aging auteur culture stuff too, not what is actually working/popular. Boorman remains an auteur. Hope and Glory is almost entirely forgotten, for example, despite countless Oscar noms and the Emerald Forest (1985), also forgotten, is total auteur stuff.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't think it was possible to make a good D&D movie in the 80s, for a very simple reason: the people making the films at that time hadn't grown up playing D&D. In order to make a movie that is anything approaching "good" the film-maker needs to have a personal and emotional investment in the source material.

 

[ART!]

Imagining a D&D movie c1980 that has an impact similar to 1982's Conan the Barbarian. Regardless of why you think that movie had the impact it did, it inspired or co-inspired a wave of '80s fantasy movies. The main effect I see is - assuming this D&D movie has one or more elves, dwarves, and whatever else - is more non-"human" characters in those '80s fantasy films. Maybe screen-worthy prosthetic ear technology takes a moderate step forward.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think it was possible to make a good D&D movie in the 80s, for a very simple reason: the people making the films at that time hadn't grown up playing D&D. In order to make a movie that is anything approaching "good" the film-maker needs to have a personal and emotional investment in the source material.

This is a very interesting point.

I think there's a bit more to it than that, and that you don't have to grow up with something to be invested in it, many directors care deeply about scripts new to them, for example. But I do think it is unlikely that Boorman would have been deeply emotionally involved in any D&D movie which actually, er, resembled D&D in any form.

Imagining a D&D movie c1980 that has an impact similar to 1982's Conan the Barbarian. Regardless of why you think that movie had the impact it did, it inspired or co-inspired a wave of '80s fantasy movies. The main effect I see is - assuming this D&D movie has one or more elves, dwarves, and whatever else - is more non-"human" characters in those '80s fantasy films. Maybe screen-worthy prosthetic ear technology takes a moderate step forward.

The D&D movie would be one of those movies, though, it couldn't really have had the impact Conan did because of that. The main effort to get it made was in 1984, and if it came out in, say, 1985, it would have been up against Back to the Future, The Goonies, Breakfast Club, Rambo 2, Rocky IV, Weird Science, Fright Night, Commando, Mad Max 2 and so on (wow 1985 pretty classic year huh?). Look at these movies and compare them to what Boorman actually came out with in 1985 - The Emerald Forest - he's clearly got slightly more action-oriented, but it's more like a dubious late-70s movie than anything from that era.

One thing we can be pretty sure of though - he'd probably have also cast his son in the lead of the D&D movie, like he did with The Emerald Forest (his son is actually in many of his movies, just not as a lead) - he certainly looks like he could play Elf/Half-Elf.

With a different director and writer, and maybe coming out slightly later, I could see a D&D movie having an actual impact, so long as it was very much part of that '80s wave of movies - somewhat self-aware, audience-aware, charming/witty and so on, not the self-serious movies of the earlier era that Boorman is part of.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Sean Connery, Patrick Stewart and Burt Reynolds enter a dungeon.

Sean Connery is dressed as a Spanish Egyptian with a katana, even though that movie hasn’t been made yet.

Patrick Stewart eloquently delivers Shakespeare while carving his way though hillbillies from Georgia.

Suddenly, Helen Mirren appears. She is dressed as a dragon.

Wagner plays ominously. A giant head, piloted by Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne arrives.

Burt Reynolds quickly summons his bards, who break out their banjos.

The heroes are victorious. Fortuna imperatrix mundi plays triumphantly.