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ANOTHER DREDD PHOTO

Started by JOE SOAP, 16 December, 2011, 05:38:07 PM

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CYCLOPZ

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 05 January, 2012, 03:25:40 PM



The James Crumley & Tim Hunter script is a catch-all mess referencing nearly everything in the Dredd universe and more: Bob Booth, Fatties; the Dark Judges, Angel Gang, Fargo, Anderson and Giant are main characters plus mutants and mutant bacteria plots. It's written for people with ADHD and would've been the most expensive film ever.

Sounds like my kinda movie.

Misanthrope

Cheers, Joe. That was...interesting reading.
Did you know Christ was a werewolf?

blackmocco

Yeah thanks Joe. Much appreciated. That was pretty fucking shite though. Would have been twice as expensive and twice as wrong as the '95 one. It's got like four fucking movies in one.
"...and it was here in this blighted place, he learned to live again."

www.BLACKMOCCO.com
www.BLACKMOCCO.blogspot.com

Beaky Smoochies

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 05 January, 2012, 03:25:40 PM
Dredd would have cost 3 times what RoboCop cost.
Dredd was never a sure thing becuase of the sheer expense in such a taciturn character with no easy origin story 'arc'. The struggle over a script they wrongly wanted to appeal to a broad audience hardly justified their investment and in the end it failed because the large money risk ended up homogenising the idea.
The James Crumley & Tim Hunter script is a catch-all mess referencing nearly everything in the Dredd universe and more: Bob Booth, Fatties; the Dark Judges, Angel Gang, Fargo, Anderson and Giant are main characters plus mutants and mutant bacteria plots. It's written for people with ADHD and would've been the most expensive film ever.

With the Crumley/Hunter script as it existed - and don't forget, it WAS only a first draft - it could never have been made, it was indeed, as Ed Pressman once described it, "unfilmable", but a serious re-write, cutting away the dead wood (and granted, there was apparently a lot of it) of superfluous characters, mega-expensive shots, and scenes that just clogged up the works, and concentrating laser-beam-like on the central dynamic of Dredd the immovable object (and representing total law and order) clashing with Death the unstoppable force (representing total chaos and lawlessness), with a budget in the $30million range, and shot somewhere like Eastern Europe or Mexico to get more bang for the collective buck, and you have a pretty solid basis there for a properly representative JD movie that wouldn't have cost the earth to produce, and would be almost guaranteed to make a profit, I mean, one of the problems they seemed to have was they couldn't get any directors to commit to the project, but they had a darn good one in Tim Hunter (watch The River's Edge  for proof), who was onboard for about four years before leaving because it was clear they didn't want to do a proper JD movie, in my opinion, Lippincott and Pressman did themselves in by not having the faith in the source material to make it the way they should have, but alas...

Just one more thing, all hail Joe Soap, the man of the hour, for e-mailing the Crumley/Hunter draft to anyone who wants it, you've no idea how long I've been trying to track a copy down, so cheers to you Joseph :thumbsup: !
"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fear the people there is LIBERTY!" - Thomas Jefferson.

"That government is best which governs least" - Thomas Jefferson.

Beaky Smoochies

Just having read the Tim Hunter/James Crumley script Joe Soap kindly sent me, it's pretty obvious why producers Charles Lippincott and Ed Pressman didn't go with it, it really is completely unfilmable - both in terms of cost (which would have needed to be the GDP of a small island nation to pull off), practicality (there's simply no way to pull off Death convincingly with the effects technology available to them then, on that point Lippincott was right about), and just plain quality (it's simply too uneven and overly stuffed, although that early scene in Charles Darwin Block was pure JD, but the implied burgeoning relationship between Dredd and Anderson was definitely a no-no)! 

I'll say this though, Lippincott was pretty much bang-on correct about not having Death in the first Judge Dredd movie- a move that was rightly mirrored by Alex Garland for the upcoming Dredd movie version- it's simply not a character you can introduce whilst initiating the wider audience to Dredd's world, and even then, I'm (reluctantly) starting to agree with both Lippincott and some of the posters on this forum who questioned how you could present a character like Death in a credible and convincing way that doesn't come off as corny or camp, if Dredd does well at the box-office and/or home release formats, and Alex Garland and co. decide to bring in Death for the sequel, I don't envy the challenge they face in getting it right, it could be a real case of threading the proverbial needle, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, we haven't even seen any actual footage of Dredd yet...
"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fear the people there is LIBERTY!" - Thomas Jefferson.

"That government is best which governs least" - Thomas Jefferson.

Bubba Zebill

I like that it looks like a functional uniform and still harps back to the earliest Ezquerra design coupled with the Bolland or possibly McMahon helmet...not sure who it was now that first stylised that visor away from rounded.

Not sure why some have a problem with the size of helmet / chin...it's all somehow reminiscent of an earlier Dredd, before the chin grew in the telling.
Judge Dredd : The Dark (Gamebook)
http://tinmangames.com.au/blog/?p=3105

Steve Green

McMahon started with the rounded one at the beginning of The Cursed Earth, but it changed so by part 5 it was more flared, and Bolland continued with that...

Bubba Zebill

Quote from: Steve Green on 14 January, 2012, 05:29:02 PM
McMahon started with the rounded one at the beginning of The Cursed Earth, but it changed so by part 5 it was more flared, and Bolland continued with that...

Thanks. That's an example of artistic freedom (between very different artists) improving the design. I don't know any other serialised story that allowed so much variation between artists. I never understood how the artists got away with that but it certainly enriched things from a readers point of view...and I think it's pretty unique in comics (or was!). Bravo to the editors for allowing so many styles to grow their own way. It may make Dredd fans particularly well suited to seeing a variation on the theme when the character is adapted to film - up to a point anyway...cod-pieces not included.
Judge Dredd : The Dark (Gamebook)
http://tinmangames.com.au/blog/?p=3105

junox


Goaty


Michaelvk

There's a reason he wasn't on the production. The rest of us would've buried him in a shallow grave in the Karoo..
You have never felt pain until you've trodden barefoot on an upturned lego brick..

Goaty

Quote from: Michaelvk on 12 February, 2012, 10:29:00 PM
There's a reason he wasn't on the production. The rest of us would've buried him in a shallow grave in the Karoo..

I like you very more!